This last Saturday I was flipping through the channels and stumbled upon a History Channel series called Monsterquest. Its really not that great a show, pretty standard stuff about bigfoot, loch ness monster and such.
The episode I stumbled on though made me stop and watch. It was about Stalin's supposed desire to breed super soldiers. An animal breeding expert in 1920s Russia was tasked with cross breeding humans and apes.
The doctor Iilya Ivanov, who had developed the first method of artificial insemination of horses, methods were um dark ages I guess would be a good description in comparison to what we know and use today. He tried first to artificially inseminate chimpanzees with human sperm, when this failed to produce any results he returned to Russia to try and use Orangatang sperm to inseminate human woman, this test never came to be due to some turmoil in the Russian government. Ivanov was then sentenced to 5 years in jail and I believe died there. Turns out the experiments where more geared to support evolution rather then create a super soldier.
The episode also showed an American Neurosurgeon (sorry I missed the name and am having no luck finding it) who in the early 70s succesfully performed a head transplant from one monkey to another. He was shutdown due to ethics issues. Disturbing yet interesting all at the same time.
I don't know why but this made me think of SIMS
and marvel at how close fiction can sometimes mirror reality. (btw, the information about Dr. Ivanov's experiments only came to light in 2006).
"No other success can compensate for failure in the home." D.O. McKay
"Never raise your hand to your kids. It leaves your groin unprotected."
~ Red Buttons
Too literal? I'm sorry you feel I have a Literal Agenda!