The “Red Frankenstein”

This is Ilya Ivanov, sometime known as the “Red Frankenstein” because of his experiments with inter-species breeding.

In the early days of communist Russia, Ivanov earned a reputation for developing artificial insemination techniques that allowed him to develop hybrids of closely-related species: “zeedonks” (zebra with donkey), “zubrons” (European bison with cows) and sundry blends of rabbits, guinea pigs, mice, and rats.

In 1924 the Bolshevik governmet granted his request for funding to attempt to create a cross-breed of human and chimpanzee. He tried, and failed, multiple times — the few female chimps he inseminated with human sperm didn’t conceive, and the five female human volunteers (!) never were able to be inseminated with chimpanzee sperm because the ape candidates died. Ivanov was prevented from continuing his experiments because he was caught up in a widespread purge of scientists in 1930 and sent into exile.

Until the 1990s when documents related to Ivanov’s experiments were unearthed, the biologist’s research went relatively unnoticed, and only more recently have historians tried to work out what the Russian government had in mind when supporting the human-chimpanzee studies. The top three ideas: to provide further evidence for Darwin’s arguments of our close relationship with apes (and thus destroy religious belief, which the Communist government wanted); to begin the process of learning how to rejuvenate old people with the sex glands of male apes (really: and this is a story for another post); or to work to refashion human society with eugenics, with the study of inter-species breeding furthering this process along.

The third explanation makes the most sense to me: eugenics was faddish in many places at the time — from eugenics laws in the United States which allowed for forced sterilization of some groups to the Nazi plans of Hitler — Ivanov’s studies fit as part of this trend.