From the Vault: Humanzee

Chimpanzees are humanity's closest living relative, but there's both wonder and existential horror in that closeness. A species barrier separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom, but what if a chimp/human hybrid were to bridge that barrier? Join Robert Lamb and Christian Sager as they explore the case history of Russian biologist Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov and his attempts to breed a human/chimp hybrid in the early 20th century. (Originally published Jan. 21, 2016)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, you welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And hey,
it's Saturday. Looks like it's time for a vault episode.
Can we crank one out here? Yes, we're going to
open the vault and let loose the humanzies. Now, this
was an episode you did back with Christian And when
was this? This would have been from January twenty one,
two thousand sixteen, and this was, Uh, this is an

(00:28):
episode that it gets into some very troubling territory. We
start thinking about this, like like breaking the barrier between species. Uh,
it gets a little dark, I have to admit. But
it was a popular episode and it's one that Joe
Rogan himself contact us about and gave us the thumbs
up on okay, which was very cool of it very

(00:48):
cool to Joe to do that. It surely was. If
I remember it was like he like posted about it
on Instagram or something. Well he's at the gym, I think, yeah,
it's uh, I mean it is. It is a weird episode,
but it's it's the truth in the weirdness that is
the most amazing. Like the actual true story of researchers
looking at this uh this taboo area, this place where

(01:08):
uh species, the human species brushes up against some of
its closest relatives. Crazy. Yeah, all right, well let's get
right into it. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind
from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff

(01:31):
to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and
I'm Christian Seger. Hey, Robert, if I were to ask
you how you felt about eight human hybrids on a
scale of one to ten, one being really uncomfortable and
ten being you know, pretty comfortable, like you'd hang out
with them. Uh where where where did you fall? Uh?

(01:52):
My gut is a three? Three? So yeah, that that
seems I think about on par with most people. Most
people's reaction to the idea of a species, a new species,
I guess, being generated from humans and apes coming together,
as discussed right, Yeah, yeah, I fear yeah, And that
would probably be like the one in the two on

(02:13):
the three. I would probably just stand there awkwardly while
the hybrids did their thing, and would contemplate a lot
of reservations about how this came to pass, who who
allowed this to happen, who made this happen? And uh,
and how am I supposed to feel about myself as
a human, as a person, How am I supposed to

(02:33):
feel about them? It brings up a lot of questions,
and and not just for us. Uh. And this is
an old stuff to blow your mind topic. In fact,
there's a there's an episode from four years ago where
you and Julie tackled the same topic. We're talking about
human z s, which is the possibility of hybridization between
chimpanzees and humans. Uh. It's something that's been studied and

(02:57):
experimented on for as far as we know, at least
a hundred years, if not more longer. Uh. And is
you know, I think it's stuff to blow your mind, right,
Like it's it's definitely something that most people didn't expect.
I came across it when we were researching for the
X Files. Episodes about the possibilities of alien human hybrids
and human zies came up in the research there. So

(03:19):
we're revisiting it. Yeah, and luckily we have we have
some better sources at our disposal this time around, for
a you know, a deeper dive into one particular case
that we're going to spend a lot of time with
here and uh, and yeah, you mentioned the X Files,
and I think that's that's great. We're gonna mention a
little bit of horror fiction, a little bit of a
comic book material here at the top, because it's a

(03:41):
it's such a mind blowing topic. It's a topic that
it forces us to to rethink what we are and
what it is to be human, what it is to
be a person. It certainly worked for a turn to
the century sort of chilling thrillers. Right. Oh yeah, but
before we get into that, let's just remind the audience. So, hey,
we do way more than just the podcast. If you've

(04:02):
been listening to the podcast as many, We've been getting
a lot of nice letters from people who have just
started listening to the show. Uh, we do more than that.
We've got videos. Robert is on How Stuff Works Now
once a week, both of us, right for How Stuff
Works Now at least once a week. Joe is also
on another podcast and show called Forward Thinking. The best
way to find out about all that stuff that we

(04:24):
do writing videos, et cetera, is to visit us at
stuff to Blow your mind dot com and then follow
us on social media whatever your you know, your social
media of choices, Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler. We're on all of them, yeah, indeed, so,
so check us out there if you haven't already. And hey,
if you listen to us on iTunes or you know,
however you listen to us, uh, give us a little feedback,

(04:45):
bump us up in the algorithm for your preferred podcast service,
and that'll help us out. It's a great way to
support the show. Yeah, I'm really excited. We're about to
hit some new I guess they call them markets in
terms of podcasting, but Google plays coming up for us
and um and Spotify as well. So hey, whatever you
listen to out there, we're on all of them soon.

(05:07):
All right. So to start off, I want to talk
with you just a little bit about an area of
fiction that that always fascinated me, particularly because you see, uh,
several different individuals hitting the same topic around the same
time in the same time frame. Um, the earliest being
that of that explored by H. G. Wells in his

(05:29):
novel The Island of Dr Moreau. Yeah, yeah, what mostly
known for the movie adaptations nowadays, although I imagine at
the time that it came out there is a little
bit of shock to the subject matter as well. Oh yeah,
and apparently Wells wrote this, uh in large part as
a as a protest against vivisection the live dissection of

(05:51):
of animals for research purposes, and um, you know, I
think that's definitely something that's lost in the film generations.
But I definitely remember watching the old Burt Lancaster version
of this on like on a daytime horror show that
was hosted by alum, what was your name, Grandpa Muster?

(06:12):
Oh okay, yeah, okay, I don't hosted by Grandpa on
tbspect in the day, and it was you know, it's
kind of grimy and creepy and Harry and then of
course we got that that wonderful marlones one. Yeah, I
saw that in the theater in the nineties. Um, it's
it's not good, but it's still I don't know, it
has holds a warm place in my heart. There's some
there's some stuff about it. I like director, but Richard Stanley,

(06:34):
I believe, And I think there's a there's a documentary.
I haven't seen it yet, but there's a documentary about
the making of it. But yeah, for more more than
just the fear of vivisection or human interspecies, crossover. There's
a lot of people who stay away from that movie. Yeah, yeah,
you know. What I'm thinking of two is even before
that this isn't necessarily like a crossover, but murders in

(06:56):
the room or post story spoilers for like a two
year old story, but ends up being the murderer ends
up being an orangutang that the escaped from a zoo
or a circus or something that was nearby and and
comes in and it's a it's a locked door mystery
and kills these people with like a razor blade or something. Yeah,
that's that's a great one. Uh. And certainly I think

(07:17):
is a part of this this sort of scene of
weird ape short stories like because another one that comes
to mind, and this was a bit later, ine, but
you had the Adventure of the Creeping Man by Sir
Arthur Kunnan Doyle. Yeah, I haven't read that one. Well,
the there's an interesting twist here because it seems like
it's going to be a marauding, murderous ape, but it

(07:38):
turns out that it's um that it's a human who
has been taking um simion derived enhancement products, and uh,
you know, and it's actually either biologically or psychologically changing
him into this, uh, this ape like guy that was
a Dr Jackal Mr Hyde kind of scenario. Kind of yeah, huh.

(08:01):
I wonder if they're going to incorporate this into the
next season of the BBC Sherlock, where Benedict cumber Patch
will be uh dueling with this half apalf man. They should, Man,
I'm a big fan of the weirder Conan Doyle stories
like that one and the Devil's Foot, which has a
deadly psychedelic poison that drives people mad. Yeah, that stuff's great.
So Okay, you've also told me that there's a Lovecraft story,

(08:23):
and this is outside of my knowledge of the Lovecraft
readings I've done, so so what's it about the title
of the story is Facts concerning the Late Arthur German
and his Family by bioh Lovecraft. This and this is
pretty early Lovecraft. Yeah, and it's uh, you know, I
definitely wouldn't classified as being one of one of the
great stories, but it's definitely worth exploring if you're interested

(08:47):
in weird ape fiction and if you're interested in the
whole like racial context of of love Craft and his
racial attitudes, because I can definitely see that kind of
racial anxiety. To put it kind like uh, in this work,
I'm going to read quick quote from it. It concerns, uh,
you know, Europeans coming back from African expeditions, having encountered apes. Quote. Science,

(09:11):
already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the
ultimate exterminator of our human species. If separate species we be,
for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne
by mortal brains. If loosed upon the world. If we
knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur
German did, And Sir Arthur Germans soaked himself in oil

(09:34):
and set fire to his clothing. One So, as it
turns out, classic Howard Phillips, just you you immolate yourself
and that's tell you in the story. But basically what
happened is this German character goes out on the more
and burns him stuff after seeing the boxed object which
had come back from Africa. So basically the whole twist
here is he finds out that that his his mother

(09:58):
I believe, was a white ape okay, and his father
was like an explorer or something like, yeah, who fell
in love with the creature and that he's the offspring.
And yeah, so it's you know, maybe it's a he's
so horrified by his lineage that he commits suicide exactly,
and you know it's maybe that's a little um, it's
a twist, I admit, it's a twist on the old

(10:20):
Lovecraft shadow over in Smith. It's very similar kind of ending,
except that guy that doesn't kill himself. Yeah. Yeah, and
also similar a little bit too in Smith in that
regard getting into you know, the racial horror, racial anxiety,
and and but it it does tie in nicely into
what we're going to talk about today, into the real abhorrence,
and into the some of the actual science that was

(10:40):
going on around this period. Yeah. In fact, so I've
talked about this on the show before, but you know,
the Silver Age of comic books, right around the end
of the fifties beginning of the sixties, there was a
fascination with this very topic of these of ape men
basically uh, and they shut up all over the place
in comics, and some of the big ones are still
around today. I mean, the Flash TV show that's airing

(11:03):
right now just had Guerrilla Grod, which is one of
my favorite characters. From all of comics history on it.
He's a super intelligent ag. Yeah, so these aren't necessarily
ape human hybrids, but they're they're Oh they're either that
or they are men that have been turned into apes,
or they're super intelligent apes. So like in the case
of Guerrilla Grod, he comes from a city called Guerrilla

(11:24):
City that's hidden in the wilderness somewhere where there's just
all these super intelligent apes and they're so smart that
they've like built science that allows them to hide themselves
from society. Uh. Cong Guerrilla is another one which I
believe I don't know the specific details, but I think
Cong Guerrilla is like a guy who's been cursed or
something like that in the Congo to be a gorilla.

(11:45):
Same with Guerrilla Man. Uh, almost the exact same origin.
There's a there's a villain called the ultra Humanite that
is like a scientist who's placed his brain inside a
guerrilla's body. I believe it's like a big white gorilla
um and that that'll come into play when we talk
later about the Chinese experiments that we're being done around hybridization.

(12:06):
There's Monster and Mala and then the one uh that
I that I immediately thought of when we were doing
the research for this was the Red Ghost, which is
an old Fantastic Four villain, and he's like a Russian
scientist who gets exposed I think like cosmic rays or
something like that, with three apes that he has with him.

(12:26):
He has a guerrilla a baboon and orangutank and they
all developed superpowers and hang out together. And his name,
his real name is Ivan Kragoff. And the guy we're
going to talk about today, his name is Ivan Ivanof.
And so I wonder if, uh, that was the inspiration
Ivan Ivanof was the inspiration for the Red Ghost character.
It might have been. You know, I'm also reminded of

(12:49):
the hell Boy villain Herman from The Conqueror Worm, which
is my favorite hell Boy adventure. Well, all right, real quick,
before we get into the crazy science behind this, I'll
give you a little factoid. So it is a known
thing within comics industry that if you put this is
back in the day, if you put the color purple

(13:11):
or an or and an ape on the cover of
your comic, it would sell more copies. And so that
was one of the reasons why there were so many
of these characters that popped up at the time, is
that they just they don't know, you know, somehow the
things correlated together to higher sales, so they were constantly
producing more gorilla grods or cong guerrillas or whatever. So

(13:31):
maybe there's somehow those covers were just cutting in almost
subconsciously to this to the post Darwinian um existential problem
exact Man versus eight, not not only in physical combat
where we're going to lose, but just in terms of identity.
It's like, yeah, it was. It's like the tabloid cover
of its time that immediately kind of put click something

(13:54):
in your head and make sure you go, oh, I'm
not quite right with that, but I need to figure
out what what danger it poses to me? Yeah, Polus.
I've also heard that in the post Darwinian world, the
idea of our b steel nature, instead of being represented
in the form of werewolves and um, you know, another
type of beast man like the gorilla and the apeman,
becomes the prime mold. That makes sense, the steel human. Yeah.

(14:18):
The fear of regressing back to your primal nature beyond
your rational one. Yeah, so what better for Superman. Superman
has a villain I believe his name is Titano the
super ape? Is he made of metal? No, he's just
a big ape with superpowers, I think, or so well,
I get by that point all the names are being
used up. Yeah, exactly, something fancy. So all right, let's

(14:41):
dive into this. Let's dive into the Darwinism, the the
eugenics behind it, the fear too. There's just a palpable
fear about this, so much so that scientists have actually
filed patents to try to keep this from happening. So
the filing of a of a patent just to make
sure nobody d else actually engages in hybridization. Yeah, So

(15:03):
in developmental biologists, Stewart Newman, who at the time was
working at the New York Medical College in Valhalla, which
sounds like a pretty cool place to work, together with
a guy named Jeremy Rifkin, who is the president of
the Foundation of Economic Trends, which is based out of Washington,
d C. They submitted a patent for the chimera of

(15:24):
a human zy So we'll explain what a chimera is,
shortly made from embryonic cells of humans and chimpanzees. And
the reason why they did this wasn't because they wanted
to create a human zy. It was because they wanted
to secure the patent, because they wanted to prevent other
people from ever making a human z and exploiting it.

(15:44):
In particular, they were worried about corporations, uh somehow building
these human zies and like using them either for artificial organs,
as we'll talk about later, or or even for like
labor purposes. What happened was the patent was denied in
two thousand four by the Patent and Trademark Office. But
the rejection basically came because the government looked at it

(16:04):
and they said, well, this includes within its scope a
human being, which we can't legally patent a human being.
So in and of itself, they sort of defined by
law that trying to patent any kind of species creation
that it involves human cross breeding is unpatentable. So we'll see,

(16:26):
I mean, if it ever comes to comes to light that,
you know, corporations do start designing human zase, we'll see
how that plays out in courts. But that's an interesting point. Yeah,
what can you say to the resulting hybrid, I'm sorry,
you're in violation of patent? Yeah, exactly, And so Newman
and Uh, and Riffkin. You know, they basically their whole

(16:47):
goal was just to start a debate, right Like, however
it played out, I don't think they particularly cared. They
wanted the debate about what it means to be human
to actually get in there in the legal you know jargon,
especially when it came to patenting organisms with human genes.
And I don't know if you remember this. It's funny
because as we're recording this last night was Barack Obama's

(17:09):
last State of the Union speech, but in two thousand six,
President George W. Bush during his State of the Union
speech called for a ban on human animal hyper Remember
I was I remember watching it, and I mean this
is ten years ago now, and I remember watching it
and thinking where did this come from? It just it

(17:30):
came out of nowhere, and I was like, why is
he worried about werewolves? Uh? And now I can kind
of see where the you know, where where the origin
of that came from. Clearly, Uh, the argument got started
by Newman. It's interesting to think of this in terms
of breaking the species barrier, which is a phrase that
I picked up in James Randerson's article in the Guardian

(17:54):
where he's talking about um Richard Dawkins proposing a two
thousand nine at the successful high orginization between a human
and a Champanzee would would be something that would change everything,
A real, a real game changer for for human civilization.
Is that makes sense along Dawkins line of research and
thought too, Yeah, he would attack that. So I definitely

(18:17):
challenge everyone to keep thinking of this species barrier as
we as we move forward, because in a sense it
is a an artificial barrier, and since it is a
but it's but it's still a barrier that is is
carefully maintained and it has a lot to do with
with not only the biological reality of of who and
what we are, but also just our our existential understanding

(18:38):
of Yeah. Absolutely uh, And I think that we're going
to keep coming back to that with these research. The
research that we're exploring too, is that that fear, that uh,
confrontation of understanding of what being human means kept coming
back throughout these and for good reason. Before we get
into the like the meat of it, though, I just

(18:59):
wanted to add a note here because I always have
trouble with this and I wanted to make sure that
the audience was with us. So chimpanzees, which would be
you know, how we would produce a human z they're
not monkeys. Monkeys and great apes are separate from one another,
right this It feels like the old Carl Pilkington. Uh,

(19:19):
like I'm I'm I'm Gervais trying to explain to my
inner Carl Pilkington. A great ape is a chimpanzee, a gorilla,
and orangutanga binobo and potentially humans, right, And here's the distinction.
They don't have tails. They have larger bodies and bigger
brains than monkeys. They're built for different kinds of locomotion

(19:40):
and this includes walking by pedally on their legs like
we do, but also that swinging from branches that we
think of, right, So the anatomy of great apes is
their shoulder blades are designed in such a way that
allows that monkeys can't necessarily do all those same things.
So that's what we're talking about here. And the distinction
is important because of you of the definition of species

(20:02):
and how close we as human beings are two chimpanzees
as speeches as a species. Yeah, as a regular zoo
visitor with my my son, this comes up a lot
as I hear other parents talk about the monkeys. Look
at the monkeys, look at him, go look at and
because that's the other thing, like, the gender of the

(20:23):
creature of being viewed is always male. And I always
want to point out, do you see an elephant penis?
Because I do not see an elephant penis? Yeah. Yeah,
but that's a that's a side tansion. So let's do this.
Let's line up what a hybrid is and what a

(20:44):
chimera is so we can kind of define those before
we get into it. This is uh, you know, fertile
stuff to blow your mind ground. We've covered this on
multiple episodes before, but it's always good to have a primer. So,
hybrid animals are created when the genetic material from different
animals joined form a single embryo. So a mule, for example,
was the offspring of female horse and a male donkey.

(21:06):
Every cell in the body of a mule contains genetic
material from both parents. Yeah, and as we'll get into later,
they're almost always infertile. Yeah, and you have not other
problems present. So chimeras are a little different in that
they are two different sets of DNA that originate from
the fusion of different zygoats or eggs. Right, So the

(21:28):
first one of these was created actually in nineteen sixty one.
That's uh quite a bit after a lot of the
research that we're gonna be talking about today, at least
the Russian research. Uh, and chimeras aren't always a fifty
fifty blend. The example I gave this in the X
Files episode I'll give it again here is if you
make a chimera of a sheep and a goat, Uh,
it's not going to be like half sheep half goat,

(21:51):
like right down the middle. It's gonna look like a
sheep maybe, but the hair will feel like a goat, right,
Like it would be a little bit more briskly or
core us than a sheep would be. Yeah, I mean,
I've also read that you could make an argument that
an individual who has animal tissue in their body, some
sort of a transplant, that they are technically a chimera,
but obviously not in a way that's really all that

(22:14):
mythological and monster right yeah, well, right, in the term
chimera comes from the monstrous myth of what is it
part dragon, part lion, part eagle? Is that right, there's
a goat on the goat in there too. Okay, Yeah,
so it's a mix of every everybody knows that monster
from their D and D adventures, right, Um, a monster
frequently seen in the Monster Manual, but I think rarely

(22:37):
rolled out because it's hard to get excited about something
with a goat for a tail. Yeah, it's just kind
of a mishmash of animals and a little bit of
dragon in there. So what do we mean when we
say species too? That's important, right? So most of us think, oh,
a species is different kinds of animals, right that look alike,
act alike, and have babies together that follow the same

(22:57):
paths that they do. But to biologists, there's a differ.
Prints They have a phrase biological species concept, and by
this they mean two animals are only the same species
if they can interbreed and produce offspring that are fertile.
So that's crucial, especially when we're using the mule as
the benchmark here, and it leaves out a lot of

(23:19):
the plant kingdom and even some of the animal kingdom too.
As we know from talking about lots of parasites and
things on the show, there's plenty of beings species that
can reproduced a sexually. It's also worth noting that, as
you know, as any given lineage within the within the
animal kingdom makes its way across time, worms its way

(23:39):
through the centuries, there's um there's a divergence. So you
have you have what was once one species gradually become
two species or more species, and some of those of
those branches die off, others thrive, but there can still
remain the ability for those branches to reconverge, if only temporarily,
in the form of a hybrid. Well, it funny that

(24:00):
you mentioned that, because actually one of the studies that
I read for this was from two thousand six h
Scientists at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, mass Massachusetts released
a study where they were comparing human and primate genomes
down to the letters of each base pair, and they
came to the following conclusion, which is right in line
with what you just said, Robert. Chimps and humans likely

(24:22):
diverged from the same evolutionary tree six point three million
years ago. Now that's actually a lot more recent than
was previously thought. Also, early humans and chimps probably interbred
with each other for four million years before they split
as species for good. So all of you out there

(24:42):
that are really uncomfortable with that idea our species are
or I guess like our proto human ancestors were breeding
with chimpanzees for four million years. That's a that's a
likely possibility based on this study. So that implies not
only are we descended from human z s, but like
you said, it's possible we will become human zes again. Yeah.

(25:05):
And you know, and also when you go back into
and look at archaic um forms of humanity, uh that
the you know, strip away the human taboos and and
we have to remember that that humans have have bread
with other species as well. UM. Neanderthal genome mapping provides
strong evidence that humans and Neanderthals interbread. Between one and
four percent of DNA of many humans living today likely

(25:27):
came from Neanderthals. People of European and Asian heritage especially
are more likely to carry those genes UM and there's
some studies that that support the idea that such interbreeding
may have made it stronger. We pick up some of
the strengths of this slightly alien species that we're breeding with.
You know, it's not it's not all completely cut and dry.
Experts go back and forth on the matter. But but

(25:49):
there does seem to be compelling evidence to suggest that
a certain amount of it occurred. Um. So, in our
an archaic sense, interbreeding definitely occurred, and a lot of
us are the hybrid results of that. Yeah, And so
I guess there's just some kind of like uh uh
like inner guilt that we're all carrying around. Maybe, Yeah,

(26:10):
you could you can make an argument there. I guess
that it's some sort of uh, you know, a species
a guilt that remains because of some uh slightly weird
romantic trips back in the back of the day. Yeah.
But this brings us back around to the idea of
the humanzie, the idea of humans and chimpanzees or some
other um notable um um great ape species. Yeah, I

(26:36):
think huating something implied just based on any great ape
slash human pairing, right, it's not necessarily chimpanzees. Yeah, And
a lot of experts have have commented on this and
continue to comment on this. Um. Jeffrey Borne, director of
the the Yurkey's Primate Center here in Atlanta, one of
the founding fathers of the Federal Program of Primate Research,

(26:58):
wrote the following the nineties, everyone quote. There seems to
be very little physiological reason why artificial instimination could not
be used between man and the apes with a possibility
that a viable child might be reproduced, And it is
surprising that this type of hybridization has not in fact
already taken place. Yeah, So now I'm fascinated because I've
lived here for almost ten years, You've lived here for

(27:19):
longer than that. I've never heard of or been to
this place. So news occasionally and I feel like there's
a friend of a friend who worked there. But but yeah,
I don't know a tremendous amount about the facility. Seems
like it would be a great resource for us for
future episodes. Maybe we'll look into it. If anybody out
there works there, let us know. Now we could rattle
off other individuals who have commented about the possibility in

(27:43):
varying degrees of fear or wonder. But really, the best
place to go from here is to the study of
a man who tried dearly and it nearly succeeded. It
feels like in carrying out such an experiment, where talking
about Russian biologist Ilia Ivanov Ivanovich ivanof Yeah, also known

(28:07):
as the Red Frankenstein. Well if I don't think at
the time of his life he has known that way.
But when these stories broke Originally my understanding is that
there were some Russian documents that were found, technical documents
about his work that were found and translated and kind
of made a flurry like maybe in the eighties or nineties,

(28:29):
and the meaning this the Red Frankenstein thing is important
to to to discuss here and sort of keep separate
from the real ivan Off, because there's the real ivan
Off who were going to discuss in detail, and then
there's the Red Frankenstein ivanof which very much stems from
um From particularly in early nineteen nineties, when certain individuals

(28:51):
picked up on these existing documents. Sometimes there are misconstrued
as having been um uh you know, top secret KGB documents,
but in reality it sounds like these were all documents
that were readily available in Russian, either at the Suitcomb
Russian Primate Center or in um Ivanoff's own you know,

(29:13):
personal correspondences and records, his own archive, so that the
material wasn't new, but suddenly new eyes were on them
and it started spinning off varying levels of unbelievable uh
you know, modern urban myth about what he was up to. Yeah,
and so as we approached the research for this to
bring it to you, we tried to be very careful

(29:36):
about distinguishing the real from the myth with this guy,
uh And you know, our best resource for this is
actually an academic paper that came out in two thousand
two by historian Kreel Rosianoff, and it was published in
Science and Context. It's called Beyond Species Ilia Ivanof and
his Experiments on cross breeding humans with anthropoid apes. And

(29:57):
I think the crucial bit there is that uh Rosianoff
spoke Russian, and this was able to actually read the
documents firsthand and translate them and give us something a
little bit as close to a primary source as possible
for US English speakers, whereas like the articles that were
showing up in the Chicago Tribune and and and other
like fairly reputable sources were a little out there and

(30:21):
extrapolated in their terms of like him making super soldier
super soldier apes for stallar thing. Another source that I
I really liked was the paper the Russian Primate Research
Center A Survivor, and this was by Dr m M. P. Fridman.
And this is that he was the former chief of
the Laboratory of Informational Analysis in Medical Primatology of the

(30:44):
Russian Primate Center at Sukhum, which is which is gonna
be a place we're going to discuss linked there. And
it was also and it was co authored by Dr
Douglas M. Bowden, m d. Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral
Sciences and core staff scientist at the National Primate Research
Center at the University of Washington and Seattle so UM.
And in their paper was what was he was even

(31:08):
more skeptical than most of the material that I've looked at,
And I thought, thoughts supplied a wonderful breath of fresh
air amid so many papers that that tended to to
get into that Red Frankenstein territory. Yeah, So I guess
we should start with just a general kind of abstract
overview of the Ivanoff story, which is that Ivanof was

(31:30):
funded by the Russian government. They gave him about two
hundred thousand dollars to find out if it was possible
to create a human zy uh. And so he went
to the past Tour Institute in France, where I believe
that he had had some training previously, and used their
primary primate facility in Kannakery, Guinea to conduct his experiments,

(31:54):
and in nine he had artificially impregnated three chimpanzees, but
the experiment failed. And by sorry, I should clarify, he
artificially impregnated three chimpanzees, female chimpanzees with human sperm. Well
he he attempted, attempted to it didn't. There's no evidence
that any of those pregnancies actually that anything actually there.

(32:17):
Um and in fact, one of them died on the
way back to UH to Russia, and often the necropsy
performed on the specimen showed no sign of pregnancy. They
see so so and this is this is out of
the Scotsman in two thousand five, they were the ones
reporting on this, uh and so again like we're gonna

(32:38):
try to parse out the truth from the fiction here.
Um well, I guess one of the important things to
sort of start at the beginning of where this guy
came from. Um so. So his background, where he really
initially made his name, was in artificial examination, particularly in
the veterinary sciences, experimenting with with cows and horses in

(32:58):
the like very real world practical applications. Uh. But and
this was like, this is you know, in nineteen twenties, okay,
right around the same time Lovecraft's writing yeah, yeah, story.
And he was a big fan of artificial instimulation, and
he figured it would allow hybridization among a wide variety
of species. But in and we see the first inkling

(33:21):
of this, this idea to create a chimp hybrid at
the International Zoology Congress uh in Graz and nineteen ten,
and this is where he mentions it as a possibility.
But there's no there's no inkling that he was actually
planning anything. It's just kind of like, hey, you could
artificial instamonation is great, you could even use it on
a chimp in a human Yeah, I mean he didn't

(33:42):
even have access to the resources to begin conducting experiments
like this then, I mean really, what he was focusing
on then was creating superior horses exactly. Yeah. But then
around two this is during the Revolution, many Russian scientists
are losing their patrons, their support systems. They're forced to
abandon old research, find new avenues, find new spins on

(34:05):
their particular area of expertise, and so in a in
several letters written to the American biologist Raymond Pearl. Ivanov
indicates that he's thinking more and more about experiments on apes,
and in particular about hybridization between between man and chimpanze.
And then we see him discussing the possibility with the

(34:28):
scientists at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and it kind
of builds up from there, Right. He begins talking to folks,
he begins talking up this idea. He begins winning some
support here and there among particularly among individuals at the
Russian Science Academy. Yeah, and so we'll get into this.
I think it's best to maybe approach it after we

(34:49):
go through the history of Ivanov. There are multiple reasons
why he may have approached this research, right. It may
not just have been oh, let's just make a half
man half chimpanze, right right. Uh. Their political possibilities, uh,
really weird devious possibilities for old men and their sexual rejuvenation.

(35:09):
But we'll get into that after we finished the history
on him. Yeah, And and there's also it's worth noting
that you know it's it's there's the work you do
as a scientist, and then there's how you sell it,
how you get funded, and then just how your approach
to a particular area of research. Particularly, something is as
powerful as this may change over time the closer you
get to it, and as you're exposed to different cultural

(35:32):
attitudes concerning your uh, the individuals and the creatures that
you're going to experiment upon. Yeah, it's especially interesting to
see as Ivanov goes from Russia to France to Africa
and then at one point you even approached supposedly an
American uh woman who just was extremely wealthy, to see
if she would back him up with resources, and the

(35:54):
different cultural resonance and response to his his research all
of those areas is very very fascinating. Yeah, that uh
rosann enof article again Beyond Species. It's the it's out there.
It's available behind a paywall if you want to pay
forty bucks for it. It is uh It's a great

(36:15):
paper that goes into a lot of depth about the
particularly about the cultural attitudes that are surrounding all these
different pieces. Like, for instance, he goes into how on
one hand, he ends up going to Africa and he's
engaging in you know, very very racist imperial ideologies concerning
the local population and ultimately concerning apes as well. But

(36:39):
at the same time he's he's received letters from the
Kluflux Klan telling him not to come to America. Right,
So it's so he's I'm surprised that he was on
their radar, Yeah, because I mean he's writing around about it.
The stuff his work is making headlines and and pissing
people off even at the time. But yeah, back to

(37:04):
this sort of the talking days. So he ends up
making a number of friends, uh, in the in the
government at the time, people who who think that if
nothing else, they may not be that into the particulars
of his research. Go. But then, but the idea of
Russian scientists going to Africa carrying out some sort of
big scientific expedition, that sounds good. That sounds like good

(37:26):
pr for And we'll see this in other episodes where
we've we've talked about you know, early twenty century Russian
science too. There seemed to be just a motivation to
get out there and do it right, to try to
break boundaries and make headlines. Yeah, And and it does
seem that he also factored religion into his early pitches

(37:48):
for it, to say that hey, you know, we want
to you know, religion, is this this this horrible force
in the modern world we want to completely remove it
from from the you know, the higher levels of of
modern civilization. This is a great project to help convince everyone.
What better way to get two hundred thousand dollars from
the Bolsheviks. Yeah, and then of course once he once

(38:10):
he actually gets funding, he stops talking about the religion
angle because ultimately that that seems to be less on
his radar. He's more focused on on the scientific frontier
here and his explored in beyond species. There doesn't seem
to be a lot of discussion of ethics at the time. Um,
he's he's already he's talking about basically, we're gonna I
want to go to Africa, I want to engage, to

(38:32):
engage with these apes and are officially inseminate a female
primate with with human sperm. He do's have an i
RB that he had to answer to and fill out
ethical forms before he conducted his experiments. Yeah, there seems
to be some some notion that there were some critical
rumblings and sort of rumors already, like not everyone who

(38:53):
heard about this thought it sounded great, but it wasn't
enough to actually derail the efforts. So, as you previously mentioned,
he had are he made friends with the Pasteur Institute,
so that's what he does. He sets out to the
to the primate center there in French Guiana and sets
about trying to carry out this work, right, and so
one of his major goals is to get ahold of

(39:13):
as many chimpanzees as possible so he can bring them
back to Russia. Right. Yeah, And well ultimately, but during
this initial phase, it's all about we're going to carry
this out here. Yeah, we're gonna we're gonna insimilate which
female question where the human sperm came from? Yes, according
to Rosianoff, they seem to have been very clear on
that matter that it was not diving Off nor his son,

(39:33):
both of whom were traveling on ure um. But there
are a number of problems that that immediately pop up.
First of all, at this primate research center, this is
you know, don't don't go into this expecting a modern
primate research center. In order to obtain specimens, it involved
local hunters going out killing adult chimpanzees and bringing back

(39:54):
the babies. So, on one hand, the primates that he
was working with, we're almost all prepubescent, So that was
going to prevent this from from happening. Also, the conditions
were not great and and and you know, surprise, surprise.
In order for primates, particularly chimpanzees, to successfully breed, they
need to be in at least semi comfortable surroundings, I know,

(40:18):
like you hear about like today, like when they're trying
to get pandas to breed, it's like you know, pull
pulling teeth because they have to be like very comfortable
and at ease with their surroundings. And can you imagine
this situation that these chimpanzees have had their family murder,
they've been kidnapped and dragged over to this weird facility
that can't imagine had very modern equipment or facilities. Yeah,

(40:41):
and and it sounds like the handling of the animals
was also really rough and it was dangerous work dealing
with them. Ivanov's Sun was apparently severely bitten on the
hand and had to go to the UH seek medical
tension over it and UH in the whole time, Rosianov argues,
they seem to be treating the chimps a little extra harsh,

(41:01):
perhaps in order to establish more psychic distance between human
and chimpanzee because of what they're trying to do about
this offspring that they have. I mean, really, he's he
is such a supporter of this idea and the powers
of artificial exsemination. I mean, he considers it to be
a done deal. They're going to create this offspring and
bring it back. And but how's he going to feel

(41:22):
about that? What's fascinating about that is like even Ivanov,
who was like behind this, this was his baby, no
pun intented. Uh he he even seems to have carried
that inner fear of the species coming too close together. Right, Yeah,
so he kept emotional distance that the pregnancies don't seem

(41:42):
to take hold. He's growing more and more frustrated with
just how difficult this is, and so he begins to
think about flipping, uh, the scenario. Right, so we're going
to go the other way around. Now we're going to
impregnate a human woman with chimpanzee sperm. Right. And he
seems to approach this in a very cold and calculating way,
like very very much. I don't want to maybe not
cold and calculating, but his mind seems to be firmly

(42:05):
placed on the scientific goal here. And uh, and so
if it's if it's extremely difficult and dangers to deal
with the chimp better to deal with the human right,
because he's also experimented you can just shoot the chump,
a male chump. You can then get sperm from the
corpse and use that viable sperm as in artificial insemination.

(42:26):
So wait, was he planning on telling the human woman
what he was going to be putting insider? That's that's
where this gets really ethically shady, is that he apparently figured,
all right, the best way to do this is to
also not have the local woman because that's the other thing.
That's where you get into into a lot of the

(42:47):
racist imperial attitudes toward towards local africans. Um. He begins
to think, well, the best way to do this is
just to not tell her what you've done, because that's
going to just endanger the whole process even more. And
this is where we come to knakry okay, because this
is where he tries to set this up. He had
on the way to Guienna in November of nine, he

(43:11):
started talking to a feller, to a traveler, a doctor Dupey,
who was head of the Colonial Health Service UH in
the area, and he ended up inquiring with this guy
for permission to inseminate native women with chimpanzee sperm in
a hospital in the Congo without their knowledge or consent,
as a means to streamline the process. And apparently permission

(43:34):
was initially granted. Uh and he and he was all.
They were going to supply a patient, everything was gonna
be good to go. But then Sainer has prevailed. They
changed their mind, and the ivan Offics were apparently just
really offended by by the whole whole situation, so they
turned around and went right back. Yeah, they they basically
the expedition. They ran out of time and funding, they

(43:56):
had to go back to Russia. He ends up packing
it all up and heading to Sukum. This is in
the southern Soviet Republic of Georgia where the Soviet This
is where the Soviet government established a special primate station,
mainly because this was a this is a subtropical area
for the Soviet Union. This was a really warm tropical environment.
It would be ideal for the jase. As it turns out,

(44:19):
they still had to acclimatize the any chimps and more
rang of thanks that they brought there. Because it's it's
actually kind of uh, kind of chilly, kind of northern
for tropicalture. But but they ended up setting this this
place up and Sucum becomes in a very important research
facility in the decades ahead. It plays into the Russian

(44:40):
space program, various other scientific endeavors. It actually ends up
enduring all the way up to the early nineties when
it ends up being destroyed during severe fighting between the
Georgian and uh Pakizan param paramilitary groups. But this actually,
like in terms of Ivanov's leg to see, yeah, I mean,

(45:01):
this is really the thing that I guess he could
have been proud of. So let's okay, let's try to
um split the hairs here and find the truth out
on this part. So what I read in an article
from New Scientists was that uh supermb sorry not Sucum,
ivan Off brought twenty chimps with him from Africa to
this nursery, but only four made it there. And I

(45:25):
think there's some discrepancy there, right. The count I was
looking at, I think was a little less than that,
more in the lines of like ten different chimps and
then some died on the way. So I don't I
don't know, maybe you split the difference, but He's still
made it back with a number of chimps enough to
establish this place and ultimately ends up with only one,
an orangutan that was named Tarzan. Correct. Yeah, and this

(45:49):
is worth stressing to. This comes from the uh the
Russian Primate Center, a survivor paper I mentioned earlier. There,
they were really um. They really stressed the fact that
ivan Off help set this place up, but he was
never like a staff researcher there who only visited the
place once, so his involvement there was very limited. He's

(46:10):
not a primate specialist. His his field of studies and
artificial insemination exactly. Yeah. And and at this point the
timeline becomes it begins to get really crunched to in
terms of him still wanting to carry out this, uh,
this strange, strange and ethically um questionable experiment because he

(46:30):
still wants to impregnate a human being with with with
chimpanzee sperm or vice versa. So another like a dubious account.
I'm not sure if this is true or not. That
I read about this was that the human woman in
Russia that they convinced to go about doing this, So
it sounded like she was willing and knew what was

(46:51):
going on. She went by the code name woman G. Yes. Yeah,
she was apparently from from Leningrad. Uh. And she wrote
a letter saying like he's accept me into this program, which,
of course right, I mean get given the time in
the setting, I mean you can you can imagine easily
imagine an individual that's so hard up they would say, yes,

(47:12):
take me. I need a place to go, so you
know I don't. And that's also this is a case
that is mentioned by Razaniof in his paper Beyond Species.
So I I I believe it. It It seems like that's
probably true. Then yeah, and so he he thinks, all right,
I have a woman lined up. We have Tarzan there. Uh.
The sperm apparently seemed good. But then June nine, Tarzan

(47:36):
dies of an unexpected brain hemorrhage and they have to
order some chimps. But it ends up being summer nineteen
thirty before they arrive, and in the meantime there's even
more political uh revolution going on within Russia. Yeah, I
have an office during this whole point. He's not in
in Uh, he's not at the Russian Primate Center. He

(47:59):
is at the Experimental Veterinary Institute uh, engaging in sort
of his original research, you know, just original artificial insemination
with a veterinary um target in mind. But he's trying
to set all this up and there seems to be
an upheaval there. Um he's attacked by younger researchers, his
key supporters that the at the scientific Academy, they lose

(48:21):
their positions, and then to to just top it all off,
December nineteen thirty, he's arrested by the secret police. And
it has nothing to do with these these experiments. It
doesn't it doesn't have anything to do with the hybridization
of apes and humans. Now he's charged with creating a
counter revolutionary organization among agricultural specialists. Yeah, and this is

(48:46):
interesting though, to get into the red Frankenstein think, you
see varying levels of either the authors not caring about
the the the details here, ghosting over it, or maybe
even making it seem as if it was connected. Is
if as if his superiors were like, this is too much,
we're shutting you down. Yeah, at least two of the
accounts I read painted it that way, made it sound

(49:07):
like it was because of this research. Yeah. Now that
being said, he was shut down after this. There were
the individuals who in the Soviet system who found out
the details about what he wanted to do, because he
wanted to go back to Africa and do it again
and attempt it. But they began to say say, well,
this actually sounds like rather bad pr This could potentially

(49:28):
screw up our operations in Africa, This could make it
difficult for other Russian scientists to go to Africa and
conduct their work. We want no part of it. So anyway,
he gets arrested, he he's exiled for five years to
alma Ata, the capital of the Kazak Republic, and uh
and oh and his one of his main accusers ends

(49:49):
up succeeding him as head of the laboratory at the
Veterinary Institute, which apparently was pretty common at the time. Yeah.
So the story I read was that when he's in
Kazakh Stand he ends up with poor health. I don't
know if that's because of like difference in the weather,
maybe his age at that point in time, but I
think it said something along the lines of like he

(50:09):
died on a cold train platform. I mean maybe because
the account I read here is that he Yea his
health deteriorated in prison because the conditions there and uh
he he has he scheduled for release finally, and his release,
it's worth noting he would not have come back and
been able to work with chimps and uh and humans.
He was gonna, if anything, he was going to go

(50:30):
back into veterinary sciences of some something stick horses. Yeah.
But then he dies and perhaps it happened on a
on a train platform, yeah, who knows. Uh. So there's
some interesting, uh, I guess, like discrepancies of between what
his actual motivations were for doing this, right. So there's
the mythical one, which is Stalin saying, let's let's make

(50:53):
these super ape soldiers so we can use them as
part of our great revolution. Right. But then that doesn't
really seem to be true. In fact, from what I saw,
it doesn't seem like Stalin had any direct involvement with
this whatsoever. Yeah, I mean, Stalin had plenty to So
then there's the argument which is that Ivanoff's motivation was

(51:14):
to prove that man evolved from apes so that he
could prove that Darwin was right and that religion was wrong.
And this is the Bolshevik rhetoric version, right, and based
on what I've read, it sounds it sounds as if
that played into his attempts to gain funding for the program,
But it doesn't seem as if that actually played into
his motivations. It didn't show upin his diary entries, etcetera.

(51:36):
And another one that I read, UH, and this ties
back into another controversial Russian scientists named Serge Voronoff, was
that the aging Bolshevik leaders wanted him to discover ways
UH to basically breed glands that they could use for rejuvenation.

(51:56):
So while he's doing the research in France, he gets
together with Serge Voronoff, who's known for grafting slices of
ape tests into rich old men so they can regain
their quote vigor Uh, and together the two of them
purportedly transplanted a woman's ovary into a chimpanzee and then

(52:17):
inseminated her with human sperm. But you know, again the
myth fact and fiction not so sure about all this stuff.
Other than Voronoff's reputation, My understanding of this particular incident
is that it is more or less a construction of
a of a particular Russian sci fi writer who in

(52:38):
the early nineties was one of the individuals, one of
the primary individuals to unearth some of these documents against
doing stuff with them, and it Uh. The criticism that
is lodged in that that Russian Primate Center Survivor paper
is that this guy basically, uh, did a little league
of extraordinary gentlemen be kind of the best of both

(53:01):
worlds and made a narrative. Yeah, Like they argue that
there was no connection between these very real um tissue
grafting experiments, and certainly that is a whole vornof did dudes. Yeah,
that was a real guy. This was real research, and
that in that research is in and of itself very interesting.
But it sounds as if basically the guy said, Hey,

(53:22):
this character is cool and weird and interesting and kind
of scary. So is this one. Let's make a meet up.
They were buddies, So yeah, I would definitely take that
bit of the story with a grain of salt. And
then this last one that I read, and this this
again seems like it fits too conveniently into the rhetoric
of the political situation in Russia at the time, was

(53:43):
that the whole idea behind this was to help transform
society by transforming people using quote positive eugenics, uh, and
that the idea is they breed in desirable traits, which
would be the willingness to work and communal living, and
they would breed out primitive needs such as competition and
greed and the idea of property ownership. Well, you know,

(54:04):
given the time frame, I mean, you really can't look
at this story without the shadow of eugenics falling on
it very degree. So yeah, I don't think you can
write eugenics out. But on the other hand, it it
doesn't seem like he seems to have been laser focused
on on just the idea of breaking that species barrier. Yeah,

(54:26):
I think he was just primarily interested in the wonder
of science and whether or not it could happen. But
it also is it shows that if you were laser
focused on something like that, uh, to the point where
you know your your ethics a road around that focus,
you can end up in a very scary place. So
Ivanov isn't the only person to have attempted this. There's

(54:49):
actually another story, And again there's a lot of this
hasn't been, as far as I could find, uh, studied
as much as the ivanof incident, And the fact hasn't
been separated from the fiction just yet. But there's an
article from the St. Petersburg Independent in nineteen eighty one
called the Chinese aim to implant human sperm in Chimps,

(55:12):
and it claimed by interviewing a guy named Dr. G
Young Shang that he was experimenting with fertilizing chimpanzees with
human sperm in the nineteen sixties. So this is well
after ivan Off. He must have been familiar with that research.
I would think, oh, I would imagine um. And he
said that they did actually impregnate a chimp and it

(55:33):
was pregnant for three months before his experiment was halted.
But again there's no evidence of any of this. This
is just this guy's word. And apparently he was a
surgeon who directed the Sun Giao Tien Hospital in shen Yang,
and during China's Cultural Revolution in nineteen sixty seven, very
similar to the ivan Off situation, he was branded a

(55:54):
counter revolutionary, his lab was smashed up, and that subsequently
the chimp who was supposedly three months pregnant, died from neglect,
and the researchers were hounded away from their studies, so
they were never able to complete these uh. And he says,
this is where it borders on the sci fi. He says,
the research if it resumes, so this was in the eighties.

(56:16):
Clearly it did not resume unless there's a secret history
here that we're unfamiliar with. UM has the potential to
develop creatures with a higher animal intelligence who could speak
and perform simple tasks. So what he was thinking of
here is that they would be like laborers, that they
would use him human z s for UM. They would

(56:36):
breed into them a larger brain and a bigger mouth,
because chimpanzees have trouble imitating human sounds with their narrow mouths,
So they would be used for hurting sheep and cows,
driving carts, and exploring space, the bottom of the sea,
and minds, so really dangerous stuff that we don't want.
It's interesting here because he's he's definitely seems to be

(56:58):
falling on the side of viewing the hybrid offspring as
a non human or sub human. Yeah, like almost like
it's a slave race. Yeah, yeah, it's just so still
letting them explore space, which also thinks a little like
that that seems like you're maybe giving them a really
well like cushy job and don't forget about we we
did send Chimpan's space. So maybe it's just like he's

(57:20):
looking at like a more accelerated version of yeah yeah,
more like a yeah an accelerated species, accelerated test subjects
opposed to anything else. So he he proposed in this
article that that they would provide solutions as well for
transplanting animal organs into humans, so they would be better
than artificial organs, which were kind of the trending at

(57:41):
the time, and he wanted to set up a factory
that would provide these eight organs, and even thought that
they would get to the point for head transplants, which
you know we're we're talking about right now again in
but his idea was that you would be able to
transplant a human brain into a human z these skull
in case there was some kind of you know, problems,

(58:03):
so full blown full body transplant ultra humanite. It's getting
back to that DC Comics character I mentioned at the beginning.
He wanted to make an ultra humanite, uh, And he
claimed that there were other researchers at the time at
the Harbor Medical University in China that we're doing the
same thing but with dogs. They were trying to see

(58:23):
if they could transplant I don't think they were putting
human brains into dogs. They're trying to see if they
could do head transplant dogs. Yeah, those those, uh, those
experiments are reasonably well documented. Yeah, also that it's all
another area of of scientific exploration that gets into the taboo.

(58:44):
But this seems like another fertile area for an academic
paper out there if somebody speaks Chinese and could get
ahold of the documents from this period of time and
really kind of pars out what the actual facts were.
But so so, there have been rumors, like if you
go to the wiki page Wikipedia page for human z,
there's plenty of rumors about Russia trying to develop human

(59:05):
zes and China trying to develop human zes. But as
far as we can find with the research that we've done,
neither actually did it, although these attempts were purportedly made. Yeah,
so the facts seem to be as follows. It can
theoretically be done right, but in order to do it,
you it's you have to have the right conditions. You

(59:26):
have to have the right medical technology, you have to
have the right funding, you have to be able to
do it without objectionable parties disrupting your research. You need
to be able to convince the politicians involved or the
public if they're aware of it, that there's reasons for
it that are beyond the squick factor just breeding two

(59:47):
species together. Yeah, and I think that's the thing, Like,
you can make an argument for these various benefits, but
ultimately crossing the species barrier lands you in a very
ethically existentially troubling area and it's just a place that
most people are not willing to go. Occasionally you'll have

(01:00:08):
a scientist pop up who has the drive and maybe
even the resources to get them to a certain point,
but society as a whole is not going to support
that that momentum. Yeah, so far. So I would love
to know actually from you our listeners, if you know
what your thoughts are on this. So if you opened

(01:00:30):
up you know, Facebook or your RSS reader first thing
in the morning and you see a headline that says
us to combine human and chimp DNA to make a
human z Like, let's even leave out the breeding aspect
of it. What what would your reaction be? You know,
would you be comfortable with that? What? What purpose would

(01:00:51):
it serve? I'm curious or even this and like, imagine
this scenario, We'll just go ahead and remove the research
and the the experiment in itself. Imagine that it comes
out tomorrow. Hey, turns out they actually conducted this experiment.
We shut the experiment down. It's not taking place anymore.
But here's the offspring. Here is the humanity. How are

(01:01:11):
we so? How do we feel about the humanity? Then?
Is it? And is it a human? Is it a
sub human? Is it? Do? Do we give it personhood?
I feel like we kind of does it have right? Yeah?
That reminds me of um Oliver, which was the I
believe that the first, like supposed instance, it was this
kind of uh ape that had human like features, and

(01:01:34):
I think that there was some distinction with its DNA.
It's DNA was a little weird, but I don't think
it was actually a human zy But when but when
it broke it was kind of like a National Enquirer
tabloid type thing. Yeah, because then for for a moment
it I think for a lot of readers, then it
seemed possible because as we discussed, it is possible. This
is the humanity is not a creature that will or

(01:01:57):
could emerge completely from the realm of the fantastic, but
but a being that can emerge from the scientific realm
of our of our real world. Yeah, I mean, like
of the DNA between humans and chimpanzees are the same,
not much of a leap. Although I wonder if a
human z would be fertile, because then that would be

(01:02:18):
the real definition of of if it's a species or not. Well,
that's why you need the factory, right exactly. You got
to crank them out, all right. Well, there you have it, UM.
We will make sure that the landing page for this
episode includes links out to some of the key resources
that we've discussed here. Again if you want to, if
you want to explore the topics further, those are great

(01:02:41):
resources to check out. UM. In the meantime, head on
over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com just
in general for all the podcast episodes, the videos, the
blog posts, list galley SLINKs out to social media accounts,
you name it, and if you want to let us
know about how you feel about human z s and
the possibilities of them. You are being used for artificial

(01:03:01):
organs or some kind of labor use or or whatever,
even just the invention of a human Ze. Let us
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(01:03:24):
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(01:03:44):
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