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).

Woah. Head transplants?

Out of curiosity, I looked up the experiment. Here's an interview with the scientist, Dr. Robert White: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bennu...white.html

(edit) A related article. http://www.mymultiplesclerosis.co.uk/str...plant.html The dog with the brain in its neck is really really weird...it reminds me of those twins who've been "cannabilized" in the womb and are just a face on the side of its living twin's neck.

Weirdness aside, this procedure makes no practical sense if I were an able-bodied patient. Not to even get into the question of where you'd legally get a flowing supply of freshly decapitated bodies for the transplants, the patient would end up as a quadriplegic since all their nerves have gone kaput during the move, and that's no fun.

Going along with this idea is kinda interesting though; living with just a head might actually not be such an impossibility. Maybe if the patient is trying to survive some kind of fatal cancer in his/her old body and just needs some system to provide vital needs like blood/oxygen flow, they could use some animal body instead. Or perhaps even a mechanical system one day. And they could communicate directly through their brains to a computer to perform daily tasks, if science can't figure out how to make central nervous system nerves regenerate.

Imagine having to deal with the pain of a phantom body...

The Russian monkey experiment was designed to create the future American Presidential candidates. They used to soldier excuse as a ruse-----Mark