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Stalking the Wild Humanzee

It is now common to place single human genes into plants and animals and even bacteria, to produce various therapeutic proteins, including insulin and human growth hormone. . . .

Now that both the human and mouse genomes have been sequenced, researchers know that 99 percent of mouse genes have homologues in humans; even more amazingly, 96 percent are present in the same order on the genome.

RONALD BAILEY, “WHAT IS TOO HUMAN?”

About a hundred years ago, a Russian scientist wanted to see if he could create a human-chimp hybrid; we shall call it a humanzee. As we shall see, that did not work out well for him at all—especially in the end.

However, though a humanzee is not really possible, a human-chimpanzee chimera is; in fact, geneticists could create such a creature, and it could be made to resemble those depicted in Planet of the Apes.

Illya Ivanovich Ivanov, an early-twentieth-century biologist, was a well-known biological researcher who specialized in creating and studying hybrid creatures. Ivanov perfected the techniques of using artificial insemination to create these hybrids and was well known at the beginning of the century for his work in breeding horses.

In 1910, he presented a paper to the World Congress of Zoologists suggesting the possibility of creating a human-chimp hybrid through artificial insemination. Fourteen years later, while working at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, he got his chance.

Ivanov obtained permission from the institute’s directors to use its primate research station in Kindia, French Guinea, as the laboratory for his planned experiments; he obtained ten thousand dollars from the Russian Academy of Sciences to pay for them.

In March 1926, Ivanov arrived at the station, only to find it had no sexually mature chimpanzees to work with. So in November 1926, he traveled to the botanical gardens in Conakry, French Guinea, and set up shop there. Several adult chimpanzees from the interior of the country were brought to Conakry, and Ivanov artificially inseminated three female chimpanzees with human sperm.

None became pregnant as a result of that procedure.

He also wanted to impregnate human females with chimp sperm, but officials in French Guinea balked at that idea. When Ivanov returned to Russia in 1927, he designed an experiment to try to impregnate five human female volunteers but was hampered by the lack of a male chimp to provide the sperm.

In 1930, the scientist fell out of favor with the Russian government, was arrested, and spent the rest of his life in exile in Kazakhstan, where he died in 1932 without doing any additional ape-human hybrid studies.

After that early attempt failed, it was three-quarters of a century before the DNA code was cracked and the tools and methods of biogenetic engineering were invented.

Could a hybrid cross between a human and a chimp be created? We would assume so because male donkeys and female horses have differing chromosome counts, but they can mate and produce a mule, and a female donkey and a male horse can breed and produce a similar animal known as a hinny.

So it would seem, since they tell us that we are so similar, that there is nothing stopping a human-chimpanzee hybrid from being successfully engineered, though it, too, would be infertile, just like the mule.

It is an admittedly disturbing thought—though the cross between a horse and a donkey is not—just considering the scientific possibilities. (I am not promoting the idea.) However, as noted in earlier chapters, it turns out that humans and chimps are not as close as horses and donkeys or lions and tigers or other known hybrid combinations.

Though, as neo-Darwinians never fail to remind us, humans and chimps share 98 percent of the DNA code in common, several differences seem to prevent crossbreeding. There appear to be at least nine pericentric inversions in chimp chromosomes compared with our own. An inversion is when a section of the chromosome gets reversed end to end.

If the inversion doesn’t involve the center of the chromosome where the arms are joined, it is called a paracentric inversion and seems to have little effect on the viability of the individual involved.

A pericentic inversion, however, does involve the section where the arms of the chromosome are joined and can cause medical problems.

This difference makes it less likely that an individual with such an inversion can produce a viable offspring when mating with an individual who does not have the inversion (chimp-human). The fact that nine pericentric inversions separate humans from chimps virtually eliminates the possibility of producing a hybrid.

Of course, the above involves sexual reproduction, but we know that there are ways to get around that natural process. Scientists could create a human-chimp chimera by inserting genes and cells from one species into the other.

Scientists think that the more humanlike an animal is, the better research model it becomes for testing drugs or growing “spare parts.” Since chimps and gorillas are so close on the genetic tree, could they be used to produce donor livers that could be transplanted into humans?

We have already noted that pigs are being genetically altered in the hopes that they can produce organs to be transplanted into humans.

Human scientists are not squeamish about applying these gene-altering techniques on other species, but what about other people?

As we have seen, there is nothing all that special about the majority of the human genome. Could we not transgenically produce a race of superstrong individuals by inserting gorilla genes into our own genome?

After all, we have already engineered numerous chimeras out of combinations of other species, so human chimeras, from a geneticist’s point of view, are nothing more than “living creatures that contain two or more genetically distinct lines of cells that originated from two or more different zygotes.”¹

In essence, chimeras are complexes of two genetically different animals. In fact, as previously noted, we have jumped across species classifications to give mammals an insect characteristic, creating spoats that give silk milk.

Geneticists have created supersized salmon and added fluorescence to dogs and cats, so why not add lion manes to the human genome? This all sounds so sci-fi and far out (as in The Island of Dr. Moreau), but is it? The following statement quickly eliminates that thought.

A group of scientists from the Institute of Cancer/Stem Cell Biology have already successfully created mice with brains that have one percent human cells. Their next goal is to create mice with one hundred percent human brains. Their goal is to study Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases through analysis of the pattern of brain growth.²

Well, if human brain cells can be inserted into the mouse genome, they can surely be inserted into the chimp or gorilla genomes with far greater success and meaning for humans.

So was Planet of the Apes so farfetched? Perhaps when it was made, but not now.

We might not be able to create a hybrid race of self-reproducing primates today, but we can engineer transgenic variations of humans or other primate species. While the reader and I may agree that this whole scenario is extremely disturbing, most countries lack legal prohibitions against creating chimeras.

The Canadian government has issued the Assisted Human Reproduction Act, which specifically prohibits the production of a chimera, as stated in Section 5:

No person shall knowingly . . . create a chimera, or transplant a chimera into either a human being or a non-human life form or . . . create a hybrid for the purpose of reproduction, or transplant a hybrid into either a human being or a non-human life form.³

However, the United States and the United Kingdom have yet to issue any strict regulations regarding chimera research. Even with restrictions, it would be difficult to monitor whether regulations are kept if research is being conducted illegally.

Heart transplants already use porcine valves; researchers have already produced pigs with human blood and sheep with partially human organs. Lacking regulations on chimera production, the possibilities are endless.

As we have seen, due to the nature of the universal genetic code, it is absolutely possible to splice a gene from another organism into the human genome. Theoretically, it is also possible to produce a hybrid between humans and one of the great apes or even an old-world monkey.

This brings us back to the topic of ancient civilizations and their allegedly imaginative chimeras, as we will see below. Were ancient Sumerian artisans using artistic license or were they depicting actual creatures that they used as models?

The mere suggestion would have been scoffed at and dismissed as absurd fifty years ago. Historians have always regarded these beings as mythological creatures, never real-life entities. But can they be so sure now, given the above developments in our as yet new science of bioengineering?

These kinds of genetic creations would be child’s play to an advanced technological society even ten thousand years older than ours is. And we must wonder where artists got the idea to create these human-animal hybrids, if they did in fact emerge from their imaginations?

We find similar beings depicted in ancient Egyptian artwork as well.

What our geneticists have quickly discovered in this emerging new science is that manipulating the genetic code and reengineering it into bizarre new species is not nearly as difficult as was deciphering the genome. The universality of the code, which Crick and Orgel referred to, is the underlying reason for this surprising fact.

As they noted, and we must deeply consider now given where bioengineering is headed, this unexpected universality and the resultant closeness of all living things argues for an earlier origin and evolution of the DNA code on an extraterrestrial planet.

Microbiologists shrug this universality off as if it was to be expected, but they did not expect it, in fact. They harp on the closeness of chimps and humans, but not the 90 percent closeness of horses and humans and even the 80 percent closeness of mice and human DNA.

CONCLUSION

Science is still at the beginning stages of genetic engineering, and already the accomplishments are astonishing and the possibilities mind-boggling. To propose that an advanced race implanted the basic genome on Earth—and also genetically engineered the human race from it—is something that will not be at all outside the realm of even our biotechnology capabilities in the near future.

Clearly any advanced civilization would be capable of these feats and much more. One day we will be in the position to decide whether to create a new, transgenic species that is part ape and part human; that species may subsequently populate another planet that we terraform.