Male Speaker

From UFOs to ghosts and psychic powers, history is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now and learn the stuff they don’t want you to know. Here are the facts: Of all the natural processes, reproduction is one of the most misunderstood. Throughout history, humanity has guided reproduction without clearly understanding it. Consider Gregor Mendel’s research with pea plants, which indicated the transmission of traits without an understanding of DNA. Today’s reproductive research often creates more questions than it answers. For example, we have found that reproduction between different species can create hybrids.

Consider mules the result of a union between a horse and a donkey. Some species that might never breed in the wild can breed in captivity creating things like ligers, the offspring of a lion and a tiger. Biologists have conducted interspecies studies and attempted to apply the lessons learned to human biology. Like Dr. Moreau, today’s researchers strive to meld animals and humans. For example, if we learn how to replace a faulty human heart with one from a pig, we may save thousands of lives. But not all such research is all truistic. Some scientists have taken the idea into dangerous territory trying to create a human animal hybrid.

In the 1920s, Joseph Stalin searched for ways to invigorate the Red Army. He wanted a new kind of soldier capable of enduring harsh wartime conditions and surviving with less food and clothing and shelter. Stalin turned to Dr. Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov, a pioneer in reproductive research. He’d successfully bred zebras and donkeys as well as mice and rats. “Why waste time with humans,” reasoned the scientist, “when we can borrow the strengths of their closest relative, the chimpanzee.” First Ivanov tried to inseminate chimps with human sperm. When that didn’t work, he planned to inject women with ape sperm.

However, in 1929, the last date that the research center in Sukhimi died, and Ivanov’s experience allegedly failed. While chimpanzees and humans share over 90 percent of their DNA, they’re just too different a breed, right? Here’s where it gets crazy. The idea of a humanzee isn’t new. Stories date back to the 11th Century. Though Ivanov’s human hybrid experiments are the most well known, some sources report more secretive and possibly successful attempts. University of Albany psychologist, Gordon Gallup, recounts that researchers at the Yerkes Primate Center successfully impregnated a chimpanzee with human sperm in the 1920s.

According to Gallup, this hybrid was born and killed several days later. There have also been reports of an impregnated chimp in China, which died of neglect during the Cultural Revolution. Neither of these reports have been accepted as fact, but a human hybrid is not impossible. Several types of hybrids such as the zorse have parents with differing numbers of chromosomes. The zebra father of a zorse has 44 chromosomes while the horse mother has 64. In comparison, a human has 46 chromosomes to the chimpanzee’s 48.

So what became of Stalin’s ape man army and the would-be Dr. Mareaus across history? Given the evidence of other hybrids produced from dissimilar parents, humanzees are possible. The reasons for these breeding failures may be rooted in morality. After all, just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should. Consider nuclear warfare. Have ethical concerns compelled a conspiracy of science? Scientists have already created animals with some human characteristics, such as pigs that produce human blood. How far does it go, and is there something they don’t want you to know?