Stalin's Slave Race

Guilty Pleasures Radio has often discussed the theories of the late Zechariah Sitchen, who hypothesized that humans were created as a slave race to ancient extraterrestrials to mine gold. This suggests that DNA was tampered with turning early man into homo sapiens. As time passed, the extraterrestrials left and civilizations of this slave race continued to thrive and evolve technologically until the present age. While Sitchen's theories are disputed for a large number of reasons, the concept of a slave race has entered the minds of quite a few over the course of history.

As science progresses, genetic modification is becoming more and more accessible. Whether this is for the best or not is a topic for another time, but it's hardly a stretch to say that that Spiderman adage "With great power comes great responsibility" comes into play here. Say you had the capability to create a new race, would you? A pioneer in the field named Dr. Ilya Ivanov was the leading expert in crossbreeding species at this point, having created hybrid zebra/donkeys, rat/mice, antelope/cows, and many more strange creatures. Even without advanced technology to a large degree, Stalin decided he could enlist Dr Ilya Ivanov to create a new slave army through crossbreeding animals and humans.

Ivanov had extensively studied reproductive biology among animals, and believed that it was possible to create a human-ape hybrid since the DNA sequence of chimpanzees has only a 5% difference from that of humans. This ape-man race  So, in French Guinea in the 1920s, Ivanov began experimenting with artificial insemination by using human sperm and attempting to impregnate the chimps. He was working with three female chimps who had been inseminated. As it turns out, the experiment failed, so Ivanov went back to the drawing board and reversed the project entirely.

Proving (if nothing else) that human beings will volunteer for anything, Ivanov managed to acquire five female volunteers to be inseminated with Chimpanzee sperm. He met resistance from the French government and had to move his research back to the Soviet Union, where he had trouble acquiring a male ape. Just as he ordered male apes to be brought to him to acquire their sperm, his work was deemed unprofessional by his veterinary institute and he was arrested. He ended up dying before being released back into the scientific community, leaving all sorts of questions open about the possibility of crossbreeding the two species. Stalin let the pursuit go, too.

There have been claims of experiments creating a hybrid, such as the famous Oliver case, though none have been validated. The concept of the missing link continues to perplex scientists and laypeople today. In the end, this is simply an interesting bit of history. Don't expect modern science to do much by way of these kinds of experiments. So, could it happen? Ivanov thought so. So does Karl Pilkington, but he's no scientist either.