Originally published at: A history of humanzees, born from female chimps impregnated with human sperm | Boing Boing
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This is some weird transference of authority to imply credibility.
“A respected researcher (who has little direct experience in genetics) says he heard from some other guy about a lab that supposedly bred a human-chimp hybrid a century ago—long before genetic testing would have been able to confirm such a feat—then destroyed all the evidence.”
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Reading this made me feel a little queasy.
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He knew a guy who knew a guy.
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This story is not true.
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If a credible person hears a rumor then the rumor itself automatically becomes credible. That’s just basic science.
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Transitive property.
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An impossible at the time human-chimp hybrid, using a technique guaranteed to fail, no less. One of these cases where “more technical details” does not convey authenticity to the story.
Although if you want to talk about cells, there’s a recent history, at least. E.g.:
But I suppose calling some cells “humanzees” is just far too silly to be allowed.
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I doubt the truth of this story. The pigman, on the other hand…
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The linked story references Russian biologist Ivanovich Ivanov, who received state backing for his attempts to make human-ape hybrids (apparently with the goal of breeding some kind of Soviet super-soldiers for Stalin) but doesn’t mention the satirical opera he inspired about a half-man, half-orangutan protagonist.
The composer one of the writers was executed by the government before the opera was completed because of course he was.
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I, for one, will be entirely unsurprised when it turns out that Gordon Gallup had a side hustle as a chimpanzee fertility doctor, and when his patient’s offspring use 23AndMe to investigate their background, it turns out he used his own sperm the whole time.
ETA: Florida. This explains a lot about Ron DeSantis.
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Chimps have 48 chromosomes, humans 46. No way for the resulting fusion to be viable. Nice story, though. The fact that 96% of genes are shared between the species makes it seem possible, but somewhere along the line 2 ancestral chromosomes fused to become human chromosome 2. No equivalent in the chimp egg, so no viable embryo.
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Thanks, I hate it,
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Dmitri Shostakovitch died in 1975.
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Actually one of the two librettists was executed. (Why the other one wasn’t… I don’t know.)
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In other words… close, but no It’s a Boy! cigar.
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