In the annals of scientific history, there are a handful of geniuses, a lot of brilliant people, and then there are the “characters.” That’s the nice term we use for the utterly mad people who got a lab coat and a scalpel.
When referring to the scientist who started his career in horse breeding and ended it searching for Russian women to pop out some babies with apes, chimps, and orangutans? I’m not sure if ‘character’ covers it.
Today’s Moment of Science… the Red Frankenstein and the Stalin’s Mutant Ape Army.
Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov was a groundbreaking horse breeder. Born in Russia in 1870, he was a full professor at the age of 37, focusing his research on the burgeoning field of artificial insemination. The technology employed in the arena of horse impregnation at the time was more or less limited to, scientific term, fucking. Using that method, your best horse’s genetics would be passed onto maybe thirty foals. Ivanov sorted out, through the life changing magic of burrowing elbow deep into a horse’s vagina, you could help one prize stud impregnate five hundred mares. Outstanding work, comrade.
But Ivanov had bigger dreams than simply being the world’s pre-eminent horse fister.
If you could sperm-jack a critter and put the sperm wherever you saw fit, why not introduce some creativity to the process?
It’s unclear if these ever actually happened, there are no pictures, and I really can’t find much in the way of proof. But apparently sometime between the two world wars, Ivanov’s alleged successes included a mouse-rat, guinea pig-mouse, cow-antelope, and a zhorse.
That’s before shit got really weird.
Because while the hot sperm is flying, other than a sense of ethics and a fear of incurring God’s wrath, what’s stopping you from making some human-primate hybrids? Humanzees, if you will.
In the late 1920s, Ivanov went to French Guinea and tried to inseminate some female chimps with human sperm. He reportedly used DNA from the locals because, racism and eugenics being all the rage at the time, they were thought to be more closely related to chimps. Fortunately for everyone involved, that experiment failed. Ivanov headed back to Russia with a small menagerie of primates. He went looking for volunteers for his next experiment and, by fucking golly, no less than five human women volunteered.
The women knowingly volunteered to carry an extraordinary bundle of joy should the experiment succeed: an ape-human hybrid.
Fortunately, it did not, but for pretty unfortunate reasons. All of Ivanov’s primates passed away before he was able to attempt to inseminate the women.
This is, for better or worse, where Ivanov’s story ends.
Before he was able to head back to Africa and collect a few more potential fathers-to-be, Stalin happened. In one of many purges, Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov landed on the Politburo’s shit list and was exiled to Kazakhstan in 1931, dying just a year later.
Why did Ivanov- or anyone in Russia for that matter- wanted to bang out a couple of humanzees? Success would likely have been leveraged for Bolshevik propaganda to promote both evolution and atheism. Evolution didn’t have widespread acceptance yet, and was commonly viewed as antithetical to belief in God. The notion that humans weren’t created but instead sufficiently close to another species to produce offspring would surely raise the ire of religion. After all, what’s our place in the universe if we’re just an animal that can breed with some other animal?
The American Association for the Advancement of Atheism pledged to fund Ivanov’s research, and shit got super fucking racist. They had plans for which race was supposed to mate with which type of primate so the offspring would be fertile. “Orangutans should be crossed with humans from the yellow race, gorillas with the black race, and chimpanzees with the white race,” the lawyer for the atheist group declared. To get in a dash of anti-semitism, Jews were to be bred with gibbons.
This marked the only time in history that atheists were complete and utter shitbags, I’m sure.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, offering the helpful suggestion that there are easier ways to annoy religious folks than banging an orangutan.
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