[Kain]

#5.Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov, Monkey Man Inventor

The Scientist:
Illya Ivanovich Ivanov was a Russian and Soviet biologist famous for creating animal hybrids. This was a man who could take a zebra, a donkey and a turkey baster and pull a Zonkey out of his behind. He also created a hybrid of an antelope and cow (with the milk-giving properties of an antelope and the swiftness of a cow).


Well, how can this possibly go wrong?

The Madness:
Ivanov was also an insane old kook, ordered by Stalin to create a super race of slave ape-man hybrids who would serve the Communistic Russia in taking over the free world. That is, if you believe certain Scottish newspapers.


How much of that is true? Well, we do know the man did inseminate a few chimpanzees with human baby goo to create said hybrid. Mainly for the typical mad scientist motive: "Why the hell not?"

So in 1926, in Conakry (Africa), aided by the French and Soviet government (who expressed more interest in knocking up apes than is acceptable), Ivanov managed to inseminate three chimpanzees. Not one of them became pregnant. That we know of.

Wait, it Gets Weirder:
Concluding that his experiment failed due to doing the whole thing backwards, Ivanov attempted to knock up a human female with liquid monkey juice. In 1929, he obtained the support of the Society of Materialist Biologists, a group associated with the Communist Academy ("Monkey on girl action? Count us in!"), and actually found willing female volunteers for the project.

Now all they needed was the gravy for Ivanov's baster. The good doctor wrote a Cuban heiress, Rosalia Abreu, who had a large chimpanzee menagerie outside Havana, asking if she could provide him with some nice monkey semen.
Word got out about this and the project was shut down by... the Ku Klux Klan.

There is not one bit of this that makes any sense.

They threatened the lady who owned the chimps and got her to back down. The Klan apparently figured that chimps breeding with white women was actually way worse than what they had been fighting up to then.
Congratulations, Ivanov. You found a way to get the whole world agreeing with the Klan.