Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
Russian zoologist Ilia Ivanov was determined to find a way to hybridize humans and chimps, and successful hybridization of other animals convinced him it was possible.
After Ivanov was able to implant a human ovary in a female chimp, he unsuccessfully tried to inseminate her with human sperm, so he went in the opposite direction.
Ivanov imported chimps to Russia, inseminating unpaid Soviet women with their sperm, though none conceived because human and chimp chromosomes are incompatible.
Towards the end of Planet of the Apes, a shirtless Charlton Heston kisses chimpanzee doctor Zira (an uncharacteristically hairy Kim Hunter) as waves crash against the shore in the background. She cringes and protests that he is so “ugly.” Just as in this fictional scene, chimps have no desire to mate with humans in the real world, either. But that didn’t stop one early 20th-century scientist from going even further than Charlton Heston did.
Zoologist Ilia Ivanov was the Soviet researcher who proverbially flew too close to the sun when it came to the fantasy of a human-ape hybrid. Around the turn of the century, he conducted experiments that involved artificially inseminating horses to create superior offspring for Imperial Russia, and this work earned him recognition from the Bolsheviks. Ivanov wasn’t satisfied with merely enhancing a species, though. Hybridization became his obsession, and he was soon crossing zebras with donkeys, cows with bison, and several different species of rodents with each other. In 1910, he brashly declared he could see a human-ape hybrid in the future.