Speaker 1: Okay, Monday, right? Is it is? It? Is it my day?
Speaker 1: You tell me? What is it? Thursday? Thursday? Thursday? What's
Speaker 1: wrong with us? Things? Where to begin? How are you? Never?
Speaker 1: I'm great? You know I never get to ask you
Speaker 1: how you are. We just see each other all the time.
Speaker 1: Never you don't. You don't turn to someone and just
Speaker 1: say how are you doing? That's true, I guess you
Speaker 1: know when you see a person all the time, when
Speaker 1: you ask how are you? Like really asking, you're like
Speaker 1: tell me everything. You don't tell me that, whereas exactly
Speaker 1: you're looking for more of like a passing acquaintance, where
Speaker 1: you go how are you? And they go, I'm good?
Speaker 1: How about you? And you go I'm great, same old,
Speaker 1: same old, and like, see you next week absolutely or sometime.
Speaker 1: I promise I'll call. You can't tell me. There's not
Speaker 1: somewhere in between those two things, how are you? I'm
Speaker 1: all right, I'm okay and of sand and I'm hoping
Speaker 1: to get this done pretty quickly, I guess, so I
Speaker 1: can move on to other work that I have to do. Wow, okay,
Speaker 1: and I'm wasting time here. I feel a little stressed out.
Speaker 1: How you're doing? So that's how I feel all right? Now?
Speaker 1: That got to see that got a little too much?
Speaker 1: What's stressing you out, Diana? I just need the perfect answer. God, um,
Speaker 1: what are we doing well? How are you? I'm good?
Speaker 1: I'm good. I was gonna say, we can share with
Speaker 1: everyone we've seen some good movies finally, because we saw
Speaker 1: some some stinkers, we'll we'll leave those out. I don't
Speaker 1: need to be shipped talking, but I want to. But
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter. We're here to feel good. Nope was
Speaker 1: super good. Nope was awesome. Yes, I really loved Nope,
Speaker 1: very very much. A subversion of my expectations, very Spielberg,
Speaker 1: very Jordan Peel. I mean it was it was both
Speaker 1: of those. It was just like, it was great so far,
Speaker 1: really fun and I love their chemistry, and it was
Speaker 1: just yeah, fantastic, really good movie. Go see it and
Speaker 1: then I'm never going to stop talking about Pray Pray
Speaker 1: on Hulu, the Predator prequel. It takes place in like
Speaker 1: on a Comanche land where the Predator shows up long
Speaker 1: before the movie Predator took place. Yeah, and it's so good.
Speaker 1: I can't stop talking about it because it's just such
Speaker 1: a tight movie. It's so narrow and focused and it
Speaker 1: just moves. You just always know what's happening, and there's
Speaker 1: not a bunch of extra bullshit. This movie couldn't have
Speaker 1: been any shorter than it was at like an hour
Speaker 1: forty minutes. It's so good. Yeah, please give me a
Speaker 1: ninety minutes movies again. Yeah, every movie is like two
Speaker 1: and a half hours now, and sometimes they deserve it
Speaker 1: and sometimes they don't. Right, I'm fine with it if
Speaker 1: it needs it, you know, I'd hate for a movie
Speaker 1: to feel rushed. So if you got a two hour
Speaker 1: story to two and a half hour story, give it
Speaker 1: to me, but don't give it to me if you
Speaker 1: don't need to call an editor, call an editor who
Speaker 1: tells you to cut things you don't want to cut right,
Speaker 1: and then listen to him like Marsha Lucas. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: need a good editor in your life. Here we go
Speaker 1: into an show, yes, um, but yeah, those are the
Speaker 1: two that really stood out for me. We're also watching
Speaker 1: The Sandman and Sandman Is. We both read the comics
Speaker 1: like many years ago. I loved them. Dave McKean amazing
Speaker 1: art from those comics also, and I think he did
Speaker 1: another project with Neo Game and that was really cool
Speaker 1: to Dave McKean. Uh. Yeah. He directed the movie Mirror Mask.
Speaker 1: Mirror Mask, which is one of my favorite movies. Um,
Speaker 1: just for its effort. It's so beautiful, it's so unique,
Speaker 1: and it looks like one of his drawings come to
Speaker 1: life and it's just a little Alice Wonderline story and
Speaker 1: I love that as a template. So good. He does
Speaker 1: have some really cool, like surreal artwork, just very awesome,
Speaker 1: perfect artists for sand Man obviously, but so far that
Speaker 1: the TV show has been really good. I was very
Speaker 1: worried because I liked sand Man a lot, so I
Speaker 1: was like, oh, how can you possibly translate this? But
Speaker 1: I've really enjoyed it so far. We're like three episodes
Speaker 1: in or something, I think. So I don't remember the
Speaker 1: comics at all. I read them in college, so my
Speaker 1: memories are gone from that era. Um, so I'm watching it.
Speaker 1: I'm like, I know I've read this, but absolutely nothing
Speaker 1: is coming back to me. And I'm loving it. So
Speaker 1: anyone who hasn't read the comics, I think you'd love
Speaker 1: it too. Totally agreed. Yeah, agreed, and that's our little
Speaker 1: pop culture catch up. Yeah, but we've been watching. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I did it did what we've been watching? UM so
Speaker 1: excited to come here today with a story. I want
Speaker 1: to talk right off the bat before we get into it,
Speaker 1: because we're gonna, i think probably in the title of
Speaker 1: this episode already we're kind of interchanging the word monkey
Speaker 1: and ape. It's true, which, of course, you know, they're
Speaker 1: totally different things. The rule of thumb is apes never
Speaker 1: have tails. Monkeys almost always have tails, and apes are smarter.
Speaker 1: Most apes have tool usage of some sort, and monkeys
Speaker 1: are dumb. You know, shit at you when you see
Speaker 1: like those videos. I love these videos in India where
Speaker 1: monkeys are just like a pest. They're like squirrels or something,
Speaker 1: just like you're just mind your business and all these
Speaker 1: monkeys just climbs in your window and steals your breakfast,
Speaker 1: like what the fun? Like, Oh my god, are there's
Speaker 1: four hundred monkeys in the road blocking traffic. I love
Speaker 1: that except that, Yeah, I would much prefer like a
Speaker 1: seagull to steal my sandwich than a monkey. Monkeys will
Speaker 1: like bite you and fight you really like crazy. They're
Speaker 1: crazy out here. These are monkeying around. But apes, on
Speaker 1: the other hand, are slowly plowed at our demise. And
Speaker 1: to take over the world, and I for one welcomed them.
Speaker 1: They can't do a worse job, doubtful. Although you know,
Speaker 1: if we evolved from apes and they evolve, did they
Speaker 1: just become us? I would I would consider it a
Speaker 1: take two. Okay, they've they've seen so we we didn't
Speaker 1: have that luxury of having seen a failed version. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that actually two point oh. They're like, okay, I see
Speaker 1: all the problems that we went with a lot of
Speaker 1: glitches on that last Yes, let's do a full reboot. Well,
Speaker 1: when they find this podcast half buried, half buried in
Speaker 1: the ocean, by the ocean, half buried by the ocean,
Speaker 1: they'll be like, what this love? I love it. There
Speaker 1: is a single unit of this podcast, a physical copy,
Speaker 1: half buried by the ocean, which I assume means it's
Speaker 1: half not buried by the right right because part of it. Otherwise,
Speaker 1: how do you know it's there. You'll be able to
Speaker 1: see it sticking up out of the water. Well, so
Speaker 1: we're talking about apes today. We are talking about ape today,
Speaker 1: specifically apes balls, one particular part of the ape, So
Speaker 1: get ready for that. There's some surgery in this episode
Speaker 1: that made me very uncomfortable heads up on that could say,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of wrinkles to this story, but why
Speaker 1: would you? What did I? Why would I not tell
Speaker 1: him what it's about? All right? So listen. When Charles
Speaker 1: Darwin published Origin of Species in efty nine, he threw
Speaker 1: the scientific world into a fervor trying to either prove
Speaker 1: or disprove his theory of single origin evolution. Then in
Speaker 1: a German scientist named Hans Friedenthal did a blood cell
Speaker 1: analysis and he proved that chimps, gorillas, and orangutans were
Speaker 1: closer biologically to humans than we had originally thought. So
Speaker 1: all eyes were on apes after that, and apparently the
Speaker 1: Soviet Russian government in particular tries some weird ship with primates,
Speaker 1: and one Russian scientist, Serge Vordenov, thought monkey balls would
Speaker 1: make you live forever, and he grafted testicle tissue from
Speaker 1: monkeys onto human men's scrotums, saying that it would, you know,
Speaker 1: help you look younger and live longer, and stuff like, legit,
Speaker 1: Oh you're looking so dooy and fresh this morning. Thank you.
Speaker 1: I just had the monkey balls scrafted to my scrotum.
Speaker 1: Well you can tell it looks you look amazing another guy.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Ivanov was called Red Frankenstein for his experiments
Speaker 1: trying to impregnate chimps with human sperm and vice versa.
Speaker 1: And when these files were declassified by the Kremlin in
Speaker 1: the nineties after the fall of the USSR, headlines like
Speaker 1: the Sun in London suggested that this work was really
Speaker 1: about creating super strong hybrid soldiers for quote Stalin's Mutant
Speaker 1: ape Army. I mean the original Captain America right. Basically, yes,
Speaker 1: they were in checked in serums, into things and hoping
Speaker 1: for the best. Obviously, this is like the dream prompt
Speaker 1: of a thousand fledgling sci fi writers. The idea grabbed
Speaker 1: ahold of our imaginations for years afterwards. But what really
Speaker 1: happened with these sandbags scientists? Let's find out. It's time
Speaker 1: for some monkey business. Hey the French, come listen. Well,
Speaker 1: Elia and Diana got some stories to tell. There's no matchmaking,
Speaker 1: a romantic tips. It's just about pardiculous relationships, a love.
Speaker 1: It might be any type of version at all, and
Speaker 1: abstract const a concrete wall. But if there's a story,
Speaker 1: were the second Glance ridiculous rolesque a production of I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio? Should we do it cover the song that's
Speaker 1: just Us Going Beautiful. I hope you recorded that because
Speaker 1: I don't think we should, but I think we should
Speaker 1: share that. All complaints can be forwarded to iHeart me alright.
Speaker 1: The first guy that we're going to cover is Ilya Ivanov,
Speaker 1: our Red Frankenstein human z experiment er. He was born
Speaker 1: in eighteen seventy in Curse, Russia, and he graduated from
Speaker 1: Kharkiv University in eighteen six. He concentrated his research efforts
Speaker 1: in bacteriology at the Institute pissed Her in Paris before
Speaker 1: he worked with the world famous physiologist Ivan Pavlov. Oh
Speaker 1: I just started drooling, okay. Now, Pavlov was hard at
Speaker 1: work on his experiments with digestion, conditioning, all that stuff,
Speaker 1: while Ivanov was helping to pioneer the brave new world
Speaker 1: of artificial insemination and using some of the same surgical
Speaker 1: practices as Pavlov. Ivanov was able to successfully extract animal
Speaker 1: sex glands and develop techniques to artificially inseminate pure bred horses.
Speaker 1: He was able to prove that artificial insemination was more
Speaker 1: efficient than natural insemination. One stallion could possibly impregnate twenty
Speaker 1: to thirty mayors naturally, while Ivanov could use one stallion
Speaker 1: to inseminate five hundred mayors. Oh my goodness, that's a
Speaker 1: lot more that stallion has. Too many little stallions runned,
Speaker 1: Nick Cannon, that's gonna say, or Elon Musk apparently right,
Speaker 1: it's not my child. I live to procreate the he's
Speaker 1: on horse, Mori, you are the father, alright. So this
Speaker 1: was hot stuff because pure bred horses. I mean, they're
Speaker 1: still worth a lot of money today, but back then,
Speaker 1: horses were like, hello, the main form of transportation. Also,
Speaker 1: they were like essential for farm labor, which was kind
Speaker 1: of important. So from right exactly, So it was really
Speaker 1: noteworthy that this guy had a way to get five
Speaker 1: mayors pregnant with just one stallion. His theories were expanded
Speaker 1: to include more farm animals, and Ivanov became internationally famous
Speaker 1: as the leading expert on artificial insemination for the first AI. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of the articles keep saying like he used
Speaker 1: his work in AI to DA and I'm like, wow,
Speaker 1: you just can't use this. You can't say that anymore.
Speaker 1: It's a different things. That makes that Spielberg movie with
Speaker 1: Haley Joel Osmond very different. Artificial insemination starring Jude Law.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you what. It would sell out quick. Okay,
Speaker 1: a lot of people would probably select Jude Laws. There
Speaker 1: don'tor now. It wasn't long before this guy's scientific mind
Speaker 1: started wondering what else he could do with a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of sperm. He thought that he could probably crossbreed
Speaker 1: closely related species to create novel types of domestic animals, like,
Speaker 1: you know, like the multipoo or or something like that.
Speaker 1: You know, it's like the first guy to go, what
Speaker 1: what if we take dog and make it slow it
Speaker 1: can no longer breathe? That sounds so cute. I would
Speaker 1: love to have one in my birth. Adorable crushed face,
Speaker 1: total respiratory ailment permanently. I love a Storis dog. But
Speaker 1: he did create the z dunk, which is a zebra
Speaker 1: donkey hybrid and an awesome animal. Say totally hang out
Speaker 1: with z do right, So thank you Ivanov for the
Speaker 1: z donc He also created a zoobron, which is a
Speaker 1: cross between a European bison and a cow, and he
Speaker 1: made various combinations of rats, mice, s, guinea pigs, and rabbits.
Speaker 1: Now it is so illogical. Conference In nineteen ten, he
Speaker 1: first floated the idea that it might be possible. He's like,
Speaker 1: I did it with rats, I did it with zebras
Speaker 1: and donkeys. I bet you I can make hybrid of
Speaker 1: human and ape, our closest animal relatives, Ivanov, I think
Speaker 1: you'll need another vodka had three bottles already. This is
Speaker 1: when I came up with the idea. But it wasn't
Speaker 1: until that Ivanov got the chance to put his theory
Speaker 1: to the test. Now, by then Russia had gone through
Speaker 1: two revolutions that had deposed the czar and established several
Speaker 1: political parties, and then they went through a very bloody
Speaker 1: civil war between the far left Bolshevik Party and the
Speaker 1: other factions that had sprung up after the revolution. By
Speaker 1: the Bolsheviks had one and they reorganized themselves as the
Speaker 1: Communist Party of the Soviet Union that we all know
Speaker 1: and love. They created a whole army of James bond
Speaker 1: Villain's there you going. Ivanov was at the Institute Pasture
Speaker 1: working on sperm disinfection when the institute offered him a
Speaker 1: great opportunity to try out his human hybrid theories. There's
Speaker 1: a few people whose sperm I'd like to where's all
Speaker 1: that research. Now, the institute couldn't provide any cash money
Speaker 1: for travel or operational expenses, but they did have a
Speaker 1: bunch of chimpanzees available at a facility in French Guinea,
Speaker 1: which was the French colonized area of West Africa. Now,
Speaker 1: I have to point out that at this time, primate
Speaker 1: researchers like Ivanov and others did not just stick with chimpanzees. Specifically,
Speaker 1: they ascribed to a polygenetic theory of human evolution, which
Speaker 1: believed that each race of humans evolved from different species
Speaker 1: of ape. Okay, so like your race, your skin color
Speaker 1: had something to do with your ape ancestor, so Asian
Speaker 1: people were from some type, white people were from another type. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this they believed orangutans should be crossed with humans of
Speaker 1: the quote yellow race, guerrillas with humans of the black race,
Speaker 1: chimpanzees with the white race, and gibbons with quote the
Speaker 1: more brack is cephalic peoples of Europe, which probably meant
Speaker 1: Jewish people. Okay, so this was not just a very
Speaker 1: racist theory of evolution, but they were like, how can
Speaker 1: we make this more racist through our terminology? It also
Speaker 1: really makes no sense because I was like, well, maybe
Speaker 1: has something to do with like the country of origin
Speaker 1: of the species of ape. Like you know, they're like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, guerrillas are from Africa, so they should be
Speaker 1: with African people and then whatever. But like orangutans in
Speaker 1: gibbons and stuff are all from Indonesia and Asia. So
Speaker 1: it's like, how it really just said? It makes no sense,
Speaker 1: Like it makes no sense of I'm checking my zoology
Speaker 1: book here, and I don't believe chimpanzees are indigenous to England. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't. Scandinavia. Don't think they have a lot of
Speaker 1: chimpanzees swinging around Denmark. I agree. I agree with that.
Speaker 1: I will say that Charles Darwin himself, he was like,
Speaker 1: it's a single origin theory and not a multiple origin theory.
Speaker 1: He was like, I don't believe that the races have
Speaker 1: a different ancestor we all have the same ancestor we're
Speaker 1: all the same species. That is the dumbest should ever heard.
Speaker 1: One guy named Doug kind Doug, that's my single origin.
Speaker 1: The picked up a stick and everything changed. So at
Speaker 1: any rates, there are a lot of different types of
Speaker 1: apes being used in these experiments. Um Ivanov specifically wanted
Speaker 1: to use chimpanzees. But at any rate, he figured without
Speaker 1: any money, he wouldn't get very far to get to
Speaker 1: these monkeys. So he pitched his experiments to the Soviet
Speaker 1: Financial Commission and the Soviet Academy of Sciences, saying that
Speaker 1: he wanted to test the hypotheses as some of these
Speaker 1: existing scientific theories. Now Scientific American says that he wanted
Speaker 1: to build on Hans Friedenthal's nineteen blood cell analysis that
Speaker 1: we mentioned earlier. Hans had also said that the reproductive
Speaker 1: cells of primates and humans could possibly be compatible. So
Speaker 1: Ivanov was like, let's find out for sure. If you
Speaker 1: could just fill this small cup for me, there are
Speaker 1: some magazines in the bedroom. Just let me know when
Speaker 1: you're finished. Clearly label your sample. Police, don't forget to
Speaker 1: lock door, because last time very embarrassing. We've had the
Speaker 1: men the accidents. Doug was here, whole disaster um. There
Speaker 1: was also this Dutch zoologist and a German sexologist, and
Speaker 1: they had separately proposed experiments where they were going to
Speaker 1: win seminate chimpanzee females with human sperm to see if
Speaker 1: they would get pregnant. Now, neither of these two ever
Speaker 1: made it past the planning stages, and that Dutch zoologist
Speaker 1: actually got fired from his teaching position just for suggesting it.
Speaker 1: The Danes were like, not here, we don't do that. Yes,
Speaker 1: we have recently decided that when there's something rotten in
Speaker 1: the state at Denmark, we are going to stomp it
Speaker 1: out quickly. Okay. But with Ivanov's pitch there was also
Speaker 1: this added political element because he also said that if
Speaker 1: he could prove that chimps and humans were biologically compatible,
Speaker 1: this would prove Darwin's theory of evolution and that would
Speaker 1: be a real disk to religion. And the Bolsheviks themselves
Speaker 1: were atheist, so this sounded great to them. They were like, well,
Speaker 1: in terms of stumping up the Agin, this is kind
Speaker 1: of big win for us, right, Russian Orthodox Church was
Speaker 1: pretty big over there. That's a big, big change to
Speaker 1: try to make in your citizens. I think we're all
Speaker 1: watching The Great right exactly. Spindle guy has all sorts
Speaker 1: of plans, so many long tongue creepy beard. Also side
Speaker 1: note that actor who plays the head priest on The
Speaker 1: Great is the voice of the chimp on The Umbrella Academy.
Speaker 1: So it all ties together a single, single origin and
Speaker 1: it's that guy, he's Doug. The Soviet government may have
Speaker 1: been interested in this proposal regardless of the religious angle, though,
Speaker 1: because New Scientist quotes Alexander Atkins, a Soviet born specialist
Speaker 1: in Russian history at the University of Cambridge, pointing out
Speaker 1: that high ranking Bolsheviks believed that science could help them
Speaker 1: achieve a socialist to utopia. Edkins says, quote, politicians could
Speaker 1: change the political system, nationalized industries, and turn farms into
Speaker 1: vast collectives, but the task of transforming people was entrusted
Speaker 1: to scientists. The aim was to match people to the
Speaker 1: socialist design of Soviet society. So, yeah, Soviet science was
Speaker 1: really interested in what's called positive eugenics. Positive so positive
Speaker 1: with big smiley emojis. Yeah, just gotta be upbeat about
Speaker 1: your eugenics. I'm more of a glass half full egist. Now,
Speaker 1: what what that means is that you're breeding for for
Speaker 1: certain characteristics, as opposed to the Nazis negative eugenics, which
Speaker 1: is where you sterilize or kill people with undesirable traits
Speaker 1: um so that they won't be able to reproduce those
Speaker 1: traits um. So it's it just means you're breeding for
Speaker 1: or against positive still has the same eugenics problem of
Speaker 1: someone deciding what is a positive tread yes and this
Speaker 1: and saying if you aren't allowed to reproduce anymore than
Speaker 1: the world is better. It's quite a statement. Well, anyway,
Speaker 1: at this time, they were still all about eugenics, and
Speaker 1: the Soviets were really hoping to breed people who liked
Speaker 1: living and working communally. We're not competitive or greedy or
Speaker 1: had any desire to own property. This kind of led
Speaker 1: some people to say instead of breeding a super strong
Speaker 1: mutant ape army, they were actually trying to create the
Speaker 1: perfect Soviet worker who was dumb, strong, and obedient. Edkins Anyway,
Speaker 1: Edkins thinks this is the main motivation for both Ivanov
Speaker 1: and the Soviet regime. So there's a lot of different
Speaker 1: reasons people think that they were into this idea, but
Speaker 1: he thinks this is the main one quote. Like many others,
Speaker 1: Ivanov was swept along by the Bolshevik dream. So he
Speaker 1: kind of feels that they all deluded themselves into thinking
Speaker 1: that they could breed need a new society. Right, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean you get what they're going for, right, living
Speaker 1: and working communally with no desire to own property and
Speaker 1: stuff like First of all, these aren't genetic traits. I
Speaker 1: don't think. I think a lot of them are learned traits.
Speaker 1: And sure you could say maybe people have a predisposition
Speaker 1: for it. I don't know, but it seems like these
Speaker 1: are more environmental traits. I don't think you can breed
Speaker 1: out someone's desire to own property, because that's not a
Speaker 1: natural I don't think so either. Well, and I was like,
Speaker 1: and the main thing is that you're saying mammals. You know,
Speaker 1: these mammals are social creatures. They need each other they live,
Speaker 1: and that for safety and all that. But so are we, like,
Speaker 1: we are also social creatures. We have that already inherently
Speaker 1: in us. It's just additional societal human things that we
Speaker 1: put on ourselves that make us want to own property
Speaker 1: and feel competitive with one another and all that. Right,
Speaker 1: They're just like no loaners, none of you weird kids
Speaker 1: who have lunch all alone, the corner of emo hair styles. Well,
Speaker 1: whatever the motivation, Ivanov's proposal was accepted. He was given
Speaker 1: ten thousand dollars by the Soviet Financial Commission, and then,
Speaker 1: along with his son, he went off to a research
Speaker 1: facility in Western Africa to get going on his own experiments.
Speaker 1: But when he got there, he realized that all the
Speaker 1: big talk about this special scientific facility had been greatly exaggerated.
Speaker 1: He gets there and guess what, there's only two veterinarians
Speaker 1: on staff. He also discovered documentation that around seven hundred
Speaker 1: chimpanzees had been bought from hunters since the station was
Speaker 1: founded in nine but more than half of them had
Speaker 1: died before they could be shipped to Paris to be
Speaker 1: experimented on. Because like also, once it had been discovered
Speaker 1: that apes were our closest biological relative, all the scientists
Speaker 1: were like, oh my god, get me some apes, because
Speaker 1: they became the preferred species which to test things that,
Speaker 1: you know, to make sure they were safe for humans,
Speaker 1: like vaccines, other medicines, French lipstick, fumes, those big poofy collars. Uh,
Speaker 1: new sitcoms. They would show him sitcoms and be like
Speaker 1: they weren't laughing. Better put Kevin James in there. See
Speaker 1: if we can't add to it. They all clapped. When
Speaker 1: he's all clapped Kevin, it's like he's one of their own.
Speaker 1: For Kevin James, what did he do to serve Paul Blart?
Speaker 1: That's what he did. I wish he'd make a movie
Speaker 1: about this and we could call it Paul Blart Ball
Speaker 1: cop Ball cop Oh my god. Okay. So, on top
Speaker 1: of everything else, Ivanov learned that the chimps that were
Speaker 1: still alive had been kidnapped as infants. They were still
Speaker 1: too young to breed. Also the whole reason I can't write. Also,
Speaker 1: the staff of the research station were openly hostile to
Speaker 1: ivan Off because they thought that he was going to
Speaker 1: report back to Institute paste about all the terrible conditions,
Speaker 1: which I kind of hope he did. Jeez. So, according
Speaker 1: to an article in New Scientists by Stephanie Paine, Ivanov
Speaker 1: actually went back to Institute Pasteur for a few months
Speaker 1: to study various ways to capture and subdue chimps. I
Speaker 1: guess that's pretty important. And he also worked with Serge Waranoff,
Speaker 1: our monkey ball rejuvenation guy. We're going to talk about
Speaker 1: him in a little bit, but they spent their summer
Speaker 1: together making headlines by transplanting a human woman's ovary into
Speaker 1: a chimp called Nora and then inseminating Nora with human sperm.
Speaker 1: So kind of Nora to volunteer for this, I'm sure,
Speaker 1: I'm sure she raised her hand real quick. Those documents around. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess it did not work, unsurprisingly, but because by
Speaker 1: November he was heading back to try again with these
Speaker 1: young chimps in French Guinea. This time he inseminated three
Speaker 1: chimpanzees with human sperm and waited hopefully for a man
Speaker 1: a hybrid egg to attach itself. Listen, I gotta ask
Speaker 1: who is supplying all of this sperm because he's got
Speaker 1: sperm coming out of his nose. Oh, that's a whole
Speaker 1: other medical problem that he needs to check out. Where
Speaker 1: did they graft the monkey balls hoops? See knife slipped
Speaker 1: speculation station. I think Ivanov himself would bring in a
Speaker 1: little sample every day I'm trying to create my son.
Speaker 1: But he's also a scientist, right so they feel, you know,
Speaker 1: you can't just use one source. You have to try many, right, right,
Speaker 1: you need a control group? And yeah, so do you
Speaker 1: think that he would ask all his lab assistance like, hey,
Speaker 1: before you sit down, you know what you gotta do.
Speaker 1: Morning cup of coffee, Morning cup of And they were
Speaker 1: all like, this is the best job I've ever had. Well, anyway,
Speaker 1: no dice, not a single chimp person into Ivanhof with
Speaker 1: a hairy baby to call his own, and there weren't
Speaker 1: enough chimps available to continue the experiment unless oh yes. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: Ivanov had the worst idea of his life when he decided, Hey,
Speaker 1: if I can put the human sperm intut chimps, I
Speaker 1: can put chip sperm into humans. It works both way,
Speaker 1: the transitive property of human apes barn, you go up
Speaker 1: the stairs, you go down the stairs, they both, they
Speaker 1: do both, and so ivan offous thinking, well, I kind
Speaker 1: of can't assume that any human woman out there would
Speaker 1: ever volunteer for this. So I just picked some random
Speaker 1: African women from nearby area and pretend we're doing a
Speaker 1: routine medical examination, then pump them full of chimp spurn
Speaker 1: without their knowledge or consent. Easy peasy. He pitched this
Speaker 1: idea to a local hospital, and of course you got
Speaker 1: to imagine medical professionals would be like, absolutely not. I
Speaker 1: swore an oath do no harm, I will not allow
Speaker 1: such experiments. But no, they completely agreed and he got
Speaker 1: permission to do it. Fortunately, the general governor of French Guinea,
Speaker 1: Paul Porra, stepped in and said no, absolutely more no
Speaker 1: to this bullshit, and that left ivan Off without any
Speaker 1: money or options, so he and his son decided to
Speaker 1: make like Meryl Streep and get out of Africa. Now, okay,
Speaker 1: this is where all the sources start to diverge on
Speaker 1: what happened here, because in Scientific American they say that
Speaker 1: he asked for women to volunteer to be impregnated with
Speaker 1: chimp sperm, and he found at least one to participate.
Speaker 1: Now in New Scientists, it says that only three of
Speaker 1: the chimps survived the journey to Russia, and by the
Speaker 1: time he had five volunteers ready, the only male among
Speaker 1: them died of a brain hemorry, so he didn't have
Speaker 1: any chimp sperm to work with. Yeah, he sent them
Speaker 1: all letters like sorry waiting for sperm, please hold. But
Speaker 1: then an article from Brown University's Laboratory Primate Newsletter says
Speaker 1: that the research facility quote received letters from individuals of
Speaker 1: both sexes volunteering to give themselves to the research, but
Speaker 1: no claim as to specific events or individuals was ever forthcoming. Right,
Speaker 1: so did he get one volunteer five volunteers? No volunteers
Speaker 1: like volunteers, but they never showed up anything? Right, or
Speaker 1: like it's so funny that it's both sexes to like,
Speaker 1: why what. Dude was like, yeah, I'm pregnant me. Do
Speaker 1: you not have any idea? What the fuss going on?
Speaker 1: And they're like, let's see if we can put a
Speaker 1: chimp uterus into you and killed ourselves a junior situation.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, would love a man ape junior situation.
Speaker 1: Can we please have that movie when Kevin James is
Speaker 1: James is the ape who gives their uterus up to
Speaker 1: Arnold Sports, So I thought he would have the baby.
Speaker 1: I thought James is gonna but I thought Kevin James
Speaker 1: might play the baby. Oh he's he's the he's the hybrid. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they just CG. That's like the really bad CG from
Speaker 1: what we do in the Shadows. So they put his
Speaker 1: face a little chimp baby. I'm ready for this. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't know why we don't have a studio or
Speaker 1: we can produce once again. HBO. Max has been listening
Speaker 1: to the show. They are in touch regularly about giving
Speaker 1: us all kinds of deals. I mean when I say
Speaker 1: in touch, they haven't actually emailed us, but I imagine
Speaker 1: that they have drafts. I feel like they thought about
Speaker 1: They've got so much going on over there right now,
Speaker 1: we just got away for the dust to settle, and
Speaker 1: then there will be plenty of shows. They're actually they're
Speaker 1: changing it all up so they can make room for
Speaker 1: our program kind of. I mean, you know some n
Speaker 1: d as we're not supposed to talk about it too much,
Speaker 1: but HBO is just making room for us. Is actually
Speaker 1: as you're not a afiliated with me, all right. But
Speaker 1: then Ilya Ivanov was caught up in revolutionary politics. The
Speaker 1: scientific faction, including Herman Mueller, who supported Ivanov's experiments. They
Speaker 1: were hoping that his genetic discoveries would help Soviet scientists
Speaker 1: figure out what qualities to select for in their positive eugenics.
Speaker 1: So he's like, this is going to be really important work.
Speaker 1: He's telling Stalin, like this guy is awesome. Meanwhile, there's
Speaker 1: an opposing scientific faction who believed that any genetic research
Speaker 1: at all ever, would lead straight to fascism, and Stalin
Speaker 1: believed the latter. That led to a huge purge among
Speaker 1: scientists in primate research. Herman Mueller had to flee Moscow
Speaker 1: after advocating for Ivanov. Several of his colleagues were rounded
Speaker 1: up and shot. Scientific Americans says that an investigation into
Speaker 1: Ivanov uncovered his idea to inseminate African women without their consent,
Speaker 1: and they had concluded that his behavior quote might undermine
Speaker 1: the trust of Africans in European researchers and doctors and
Speaker 1: make problematic any further expeditions of Russian scientists to Africa.
Speaker 1: But of course Ilya was not in Africa anymore. Um
Speaker 1: So this kind of sounds to me like, oh, we
Speaker 1: came up with a really good excuse to get rid
Speaker 1: of somebody who we already wanted to get rid of.
Speaker 1: It just didn't have a good excuse. But here's a
Speaker 1: great one. But at any rate, Ivanov was caught up
Speaker 1: in this purge. He was exiled to Kazakhstan in nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty They said, you have no choice but to Stan's
Speaker 1: Diana does gen z hum. Yeah, that's medium TikTok stuff. Anyway.
Speaker 1: He worked there in Kazakhstan for a zoological institute until
Speaker 1: his death from a stroke in nineteen thirty two. And
Speaker 1: he actually was absolved of all the claims against him
Speaker 1: a few years later, and Pavlov wrote his obituary Pavlov
Speaker 1: is a really big anti communist, and be as he
Speaker 1: was so respected, they let him get away with saying
Speaker 1: a lot of crazy shits about them. Now. In two
Speaker 1: Dmitri Shostakovich even sketched out an opera called Orango about
Speaker 1: these experiments, and it had a libretto written by Tolstoy,
Speaker 1: real whose of Russian writers. Only about forty minutes of
Speaker 1: it exists and it was wholly abandoned by everyone involved.
Speaker 1: But in two thousand eleven it was actually staged by
Speaker 1: the Los Angeles Philharmonic. I wish I'd seen it. The
Speaker 1: l A Times describes the plot as this quote the
Speaker 1: rise and fall of Orango, a k a. Jean Or,
Speaker 1: a human ape hybrid who becomes a virulent anti communist
Speaker 1: and newspaper baron through a combination of sleazy journalism, stock
Speaker 1: exchange swindles, and ruthless blackmail, before his corrupted humanity causes
Speaker 1: him to revert back to his best deal nature. He
Speaker 1: has then put in a cage and displayed as a
Speaker 1: cautionary tale. So this sounds like the basis for Dunstan
Speaker 1: checks exactly hit Orangutan comedy of I want to say,
Speaker 1: Jason Alexander and a monkey in a hotel ape excuse me, Orangut.
Speaker 1: It's interesting how they're like, as soon as the ape
Speaker 1: became human, he became an anti communist, even though the
Speaker 1: whole point is to make people who want to be
Speaker 1: communists because of their ape tendencies. And then I love
Speaker 1: the idea of an ape doing stock market. I just
Speaker 1: want a m on the wall street, like bye bye bye.
Speaker 1: He's got the little tie and glasses. He's sitting in
Speaker 1: a big yeah, throwing papers everywhere. So you know, that's
Speaker 1: just one crazy Russian scientist and his ape experiments. But
Speaker 1: we also have our friend, says Voronov, to talk about,
Speaker 1: and he thought monkey testicles could make you live forever.
Speaker 1: So let's take a quick break and come back with
Speaker 1: that right after this. Alright, apes and monkeys, welcome back
Speaker 1: to the show. Yea, and Serge Voronov is the name
Speaker 1: and monkey balls of the game. Now. Serge Voronov was
Speaker 1: born in Russia in eighteen eighty six, but when he
Speaker 1: was eighteen he moved to France and he became a
Speaker 1: citizen in eight So people are like, he's a French scientist.
Speaker 1: Russian science are the two countries fighting for him being
Speaker 1: connected them or against Well, the Russians are like, no,
Speaker 1: he's French scientists. I think depends on which part of
Speaker 1: his life we're talking about. He studied originally under transplant
Speaker 1: pioneer Alexis Kerrill, which is what got him interested in
Speaker 1: the possibilities of using animal to human hormone transfers to
Speaker 1: restore people to youth and vigor Then, in eighteen eighty nine,
Speaker 1: he started working with a seventy two year old experimental physiologist,
Speaker 1: Charles Edouard brown Sequard. This guy also thought that animal
Speaker 1: glands had something to offer human beings, and now he
Speaker 1: gave a lot to science about how the spinal cord works.
Speaker 1: He was the first to theorize the existence of hormone,
Speaker 1: but unfortunately he's best known for this little experiment. The
Speaker 1: same year Voronov started working with him, Brown Sequard injected
Speaker 1: himself with a serum made up of crushed up matter
Speaker 1: from the testicles of guinea pigs and dogs and told
Speaker 1: an entire scientific meetings worth of people that it helped
Speaker 1: with rejuvenation and prolonged life. He said that it renewed
Speaker 1: his own muscle strength, and then he even told them
Speaker 1: that he had passed to the final test by quote.
Speaker 1: Paying a visit to his young wife just hours before
Speaker 1: this lecture, which I love the idea of him mean,
Speaker 1: like and fellows, I God laid before I showed up
Speaker 1: here and Dick worked great, all exactly. I love this.
Speaker 1: The idea of this guy too, going to his wife, Honey,
Speaker 1: are you ready? I just injected myself with guinea pigs testicles?
Speaker 1: She's like, oh la la, now this this like this
Speaker 1: serum was not very well received by the scientific community.
Speaker 1: It became known derisively as the Brown Sequard elixir. One
Speaker 1: newspaper jokingly likened it to post Leon's search for the
Speaker 1: Fountain of youth. Another said quote, the lecture must be
Speaker 1: seen as further proof of the necessity of retiring professors
Speaker 1: who have attained their three score and ten years little ages.
Speaker 1: But I mean, like this old man needs to go
Speaker 1: light out. At a certain point, you just start trying
Speaker 1: to justify your job in the industry, making some crazy
Speaker 1: sh up doing the most right now. The widespread ridicule
Speaker 1: of the serum and the fact that it did not
Speaker 1: really have the anti aging properties that they were hoping for,
Speaker 1: made Voronoff decide that tissue grafting would be a much
Speaker 1: more effective treatment than injections. So in eighteen ninety six,
Speaker 1: Voronov moved to Egypt and started studying eunuchs. According to
Speaker 1: a two seven scientific paper, he quote noted their obesity,
Speaker 1: lack of body hair, and broad pelvis is, as well
Speaker 1: as their flaccid muscles, lethargic movements, memory problems, and lowered intelligence.
Speaker 1: I'm thinking back to several stories we've done about a
Speaker 1: real smart eunuch. Hear the whole places bids. I'm just like,
Speaker 1: whatever you say. But Voronov blamed all these things on
Speaker 1: their lack of testicles, which he assumed deprived eunuchs of
Speaker 1: all important glandular excretions. God, I'm no geneticist, but I
Speaker 1: can tell you that's false. Um. In his nine book,
Speaker 1: Life A Study of the me Means of Restoring Vital
Speaker 1: Energy and Prolonging Life, which is a terrible title, not
Speaker 1: an English major, I guess now he's like, I just
Speaker 1: need to lay out the fact. So in this ridiculously
Speaker 1: titled book, he wrote, quote, the sex gland stimulates cerebral
Speaker 1: activity as well as muscular energy and amorous passion. It
Speaker 1: pours into the stream of the blood, a species of
Speaker 1: vital fluid which restores the energy of all the cells
Speaker 1: and spreads happiness. A healthy sexual gland tissue grafted onto
Speaker 1: the testicles of an aging man basically injected us with
Speaker 1: the vitality of youth. But not only that, he also
Speaker 1: believed that it could cure impotence, sinility, and schizophrenia. He
Speaker 1: also thought it could radically prolonged lives and improve your
Speaker 1: sex drive. Truly a miracle cure step right eye. The
Speaker 1: question is what can't it do. It'll your baldness, It'll
Speaker 1: it'll make you grow an extra arm. Whoa who doesn't
Speaker 1: need one of those? It'll try up your sinuses and
Speaker 1: He spent fourteen years working and studying at an Egyptian
Speaker 1: hospital before he returned to France, and then around nineteen seventeen,
Speaker 1: he started to receive funding from a wealthy American named
Speaker 1: Evelyn Bostwick, which gave him his chance to start experimenting
Speaker 1: on transplants on animals because they were expensive to get.
Speaker 1: You know, get the actual apes and put them somewhere
Speaker 1: and take care of them and all that. Evelyn also
Speaker 1: translated that terribly titled book into English. She's just a
Speaker 1: real big fan of his work. I love monkey balls.
Speaker 1: She's She's like, figure out what I need to smear
Speaker 1: on my face. I looked young again. Voronov performed over
Speaker 1: five hundred operations where he transplanted testicular tissue from young
Speaker 1: horses and sheep to older horses and sheep and was like,
Speaker 1: look now they're they're back to their old strength again.
Speaker 1: They're neighing louder, they're running faster, they're bigger than they
Speaker 1: used to be, all that kind of thing. And during
Speaker 1: the course of all these experiments, he decided that primates
Speaker 1: were the perfect transplant option for humans thanks to all
Speaker 1: those biological similarities we talked about, And in nineteen fifteen,
Speaker 1: he implanted a chimpanzee thyroid gland to a mentally disabled
Speaker 1: boy in France and claimed that over the course of
Speaker 1: a year, the boy's mental faculties returned to normal. He
Speaker 1: was no longer mentally disabled, which not a lot of
Speaker 1: proof to back up that claim. It was just a
Speaker 1: picture before and after, and the kid looks a little older.
Speaker 1: I don't know, and it doesn't look like much changed,
Speaker 1: but okay, wow, now okay. Vordov started his testical transplantation
Speaker 1: with human to human tests. At first, he used the
Speaker 1: tests of executed criminals and transplanted them into aging millionaires. Honestly,
Speaker 1: I'm surprised at this point the millionaires weren't like, no,
Speaker 1: I don't want to become a criminal, like you know,
Speaker 1: like like like what's that Simpsons where Homer gets the
Speaker 1: hair transplant from snake and the hair connects to his
Speaker 1: brain into a killer, which actually people did think that.
Speaker 1: I did too. He thought that it could. He wanted
Speaker 1: to test it anyway. He was like, maybe that will
Speaker 1: give you certain characteristics of the donor, right, um, But
Speaker 1: I guess it was just the balls he could get
Speaker 1: his hands on. At the time. Well, this became a
Speaker 1: very popular experiment. I guess a lot of rich folks
Speaker 1: thought this was a great idea, and the demand for
Speaker 1: the procedure soon outstripped the supply of dead criminals balls.
Speaker 1: So Vornov knew he had to find a new source
Speaker 1: of nords for his marbles magic, so naturally, he turned
Speaker 1: to apes. His first official implantation was June twelfth of
Speaker 1: nineteen t He he took giving you this paragraph. He took.
Speaker 1: He took thin slices of testicles from chimp, from chimpanzees
Speaker 1: and baboons, and he implanted them inside the patients scrowed um. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he believed that the thinness. God, he believed that the
Speaker 1: thinness of the tissue would help the body fuse with
Speaker 1: it instead of rejecting it. I mean, at least he
Speaker 1: thought of that. It's just like, oh, oh, I feel
Speaker 1: so much younger. There's a thin slice of eight balls
Speaker 1: in my scrowed um. God, I know, very craft. I
Speaker 1: mean the discomfort, like, there's no way this isn't weeks
Speaker 1: of recovery. Right. It does not say, but I would
Speaker 1: assume that. I mean, it seems like quite a thing
Speaker 1: to do to cut your scrotum open or cut it
Speaker 1: in any way. All right, let's stop, let's stop. There's
Speaker 1: a big here for four and off. Because he also
Speaker 1: married the American heiress and his biggest supporter, Evelyn Bostwick,
Speaker 1: same year. What a what a time. Wow, He was like,
Speaker 1: I need to celebrate my first tectical transfer with a
Speaker 1: nice wedding night. But Evelyn sadly died only a year later,
Speaker 1: and her daughter, who was a gender nonconforming lesbian speedboat
Speaker 1: racer named Marian Joe Carstairs who is definitely getting her
Speaker 1: own episode at some point. She maintained for the rest
Speaker 1: of her life that Vornov had killed her mother for
Speaker 1: the money, and there was no evidence to back this up.
Speaker 1: But Evelyn did leave Vornov a considerable inheritance and a
Speaker 1: large income for the rest of his life. So you know,
Speaker 1: speculation station he killed that woman, he killed her. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't know, what do you think. He doesn't strike
Speaker 1: me as a killer. But but he needed that money,
Speaker 1: need that money needed to buy those monkey balls. Monkey
Speaker 1: balls aren't cheap. He's like, listen, I know that you
Speaker 1: pay for everything. I'll ready, But like, what if I
Speaker 1: could just use it however I wanted. I guess that's
Speaker 1: my question, is like he she was already covering his expenses,
Speaker 1: right unless that year of time she started to get real,
Speaker 1: like particular about how he was spending his money or
Speaker 1: something the money or something like maybe, but otherwise she
Speaker 1: seemed to be so into it. What would be the point?
Speaker 1: All right? Well, anyway, by four and Off was the
Speaker 1: director of the experimental laboratory at the College de France.
Speaker 1: Seven hundred of the world's leading surgeons at an international
Speaker 1: conference in London applauded his work rejuvenating old men. I mean,
Speaker 1: this guy was internationally respected for the work he was doing,
Speaker 1: and his work was so in demand that a facility
Speaker 1: in Africa was set up solely to capture and maintain
Speaker 1: apes for gland transfers, and that could actually be the
Speaker 1: exact same facility in French Guinea that Ivanov went to,
Speaker 1: because there weren't that many of these like primate reserves
Speaker 1: already existing at this time. They were starting to get
Speaker 1: set up over these years, but um, there weren't that many,
Speaker 1: so it could be the exact same hospital. Also, one
Speaker 1: of the rumors around Ivanov's work was that the Bolsheviks
Speaker 1: sent him to French Guinea just to bring back monkeys
Speaker 1: for gland transfers, because they were like aging, you know,
Speaker 1: and they want to be rejuvenated for the betterment of
Speaker 1: the people or whatever. Um. But our guy Atkins from
Speaker 1: that New Scientist article doesn't think that that makes much sense.
Speaker 1: In the article, he says, quote, if you want to
Speaker 1: cover up a bizarre scheme to rejuvenate aging politicians, then
Speaker 1: you wouldn't choose an even more bizarre project that's going
Speaker 1: to attract a lot of publicity, which is a fair point.
Speaker 1: And also at this conference, Voronov announced that he was
Speaker 1: close to figuring out how to use his treatments to
Speaker 1: help women with rejuvenation and anti aging, because you know,
Speaker 1: women don't have testicles to graft things on. So he's like,
Speaker 1: I really got to get to work on that, and
Speaker 1: he promised at that conference to quote turn Randmother's into debutante.
Speaker 1: Throughout the nineteen twenties, the surgery was incredibly popular. It
Speaker 1: even inspired other scientists to get into the gonad game,
Speaker 1: for example, Eugen Steinock in Vienna. He decided that a
Speaker 1: simple twenty minute procedure could do everything Varonov promised and more.
Speaker 1: McGill University's Office of Science and Society rights that quote.
Speaker 1: At the time, researchers had determined that there were two
Speaker 1: types of tissues in the testicles. Seminal tubules produced spermatozoa,
Speaker 1: but there were also cells between the tubules that released
Speaker 1: sex hormones. Seinock's idea was that the two types of
Speaker 1: tissues compete for nourishment, and that stifling the sperm producing
Speaker 1: tissues would boost the production of sex hormones. So essentially,
Speaker 1: he would give men a partial vasectomy, and patients, who
Speaker 1: included Sigmund Freud and W. B. Yates, would call quote
Speaker 1: getting stein I've been stein Hey, you got Steinocked. Yet
Speaker 1: we look great. He wrote that this damning of the
Speaker 1: seminal canal quote changed my patients from feeble, parched, dribbling
Speaker 1: drones two men of vigorous bloom who threw away their glasses,
Speaker 1: shaved twice a day, dragged loads of up the two
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty pounds, and even indulged in such youthful
Speaker 1: follies as buying land in Florida. I love that idea.
Speaker 1: Only a young man would buy land in Florida. Oh,
Speaker 1: I would buy land in Florida. But it's a young
Speaker 1: man's game. What is it about Florida specifically? That's so.
Speaker 1: He also claimed that he had thrice rejuvenated himself, which
Speaker 1: as he is Austrian, right, which has McGill University just
Speaker 1: making sure I'm doing the right voice here, as mckill
Speaker 1: university points out, is a very strange claim because quote,
Speaker 1: once the duct is tied off, it's tied off. Whatever
Speaker 1: improvements Steinock and his patients felt was probably due to
Speaker 1: wishful thinking, because, as we now know, vasectomes do not
Speaker 1: boost hormonal output by the testes. Sorry Steinock. Stein. Also,
Speaker 1: by the way, thought that he could cure homosexuality by
Speaker 1: transplanting a heterosexual man's testicle into a homosexual man's body
Speaker 1: for quote remasculinization. But fortunately nobody ever volunteered for this
Speaker 1: experiment for some reason, I don't even think they let
Speaker 1: him get to the point of asking. They were like
Speaker 1: no Steinock all right. But for Enough was going strong
Speaker 1: throughout the twenties. He grafted over five hundred men himself
Speaker 1: with his hands, and his techniques were used on thousands more.
Speaker 1: Now we already know that for Enough ranched out a
Speaker 1: little when he worked with Ilya Ivanov to graft a
Speaker 1: human woman's ovary into a monkey and then tried to
Speaker 1: impregnate it with human sperm. Around Apparently he also transplanted
Speaker 1: monkey ovaries into human women as well, though it's not
Speaker 1: clear if he actually tried to inseminate them or not.
Speaker 1: Likely the ovaries were just I assume rejected by the
Speaker 1: body so he never got that far, or they just
Speaker 1: didn't feel like mentioning it. I don't know. But for
Speaker 1: Enough also claimed to use his grafting techniques to create
Speaker 1: a flock of super sheep in n He said they
Speaker 1: were bigger and stronger, than non grafted sheep, and from
Speaker 1: that he hypothesized that a super human giant could also
Speaker 1: possibly be created through graphic Seriously, they're trying to make
Speaker 1: a Captain America here. Yeah, and it's so they're just like,
Speaker 1: all you needed two balls and a dream. Why they
Speaker 1: came up with this whole problem with serum and the
Speaker 1: m c U when it could have just been sewing
Speaker 1: some balls out of the guy? Do you Roger's head
Speaker 1: had quickly agreed if they had said it done all
Speaker 1: it is a small operation, whatever it takes. He said,
Speaker 1: that's true. I could do this all day. And he's
Speaker 1: super strong, but he has a real hard time running
Speaker 1: because he's got four balls. Popular culture was rife with
Speaker 1: references to this treatment time. The poet E. Cummings described
Speaker 1: war Enough as quote the famous doctor who inserts monkey
Speaker 1: glands into millionaires. A new cocktail called the monkey Gland,
Speaker 1: which is made of gin, orange juice, grenadine and Absinthe
Speaker 1: became the hottest new beverage. That is, so, why did
Speaker 1: you have to put grenadine in it? Because now with
Speaker 1: orange juice and grenadine, the color you're getting looks to
Speaker 1: me and I'm sorry for anyone's drinking this right now
Speaker 1: while you're listening to our podcast. But it looks like
Speaker 1: a surgical fluid, you know, like I'm picturing that pinkish
Speaker 1: orange kind of thick that is. I'm sorry, it's something
Speaker 1: that came out of a Yeah. Sorry. They were like,
Speaker 1: we want to achieve a color that's really close to
Speaker 1: a monkey mall. It came into my head. I had
Speaker 1: to share it with everyone. That's what Boro said, all right,
Speaker 1: if you would just keep these things to yourself. Also
Speaker 1: in Paris, a popular home decre item where ashtrays depicting
Speaker 1: monkeys protecting their private parts with the phrase no baronof
Speaker 1: you won't get me painted on. I want one of
Speaker 1: those ashtrays, so svariously, if any if there is one
Speaker 1: out there in the vinted the world, I would die
Speaker 1: towne it. That's hilarious. So good. No far enough, you
Speaker 1: won't get me with him covering his balls like there's
Speaker 1: the fourth one. Oh my god, alright, says let's I
Speaker 1: get it. Let's go take a look at see what
Speaker 1: you can find. We'll take a quick mercial break and
Speaker 1: be right back. Welcome back to the show. Still haven't
Speaker 1: found the ash tray? But when I do, I promise
Speaker 1: I will post about it. Okay, So it seemed like
Speaker 1: the world was Varnov's rocky mountain oyster. But which is which?
Speaker 1: Is that a ball reference? Yes, that is a reference.
Speaker 1: Apparently I only know this reference because one time I
Speaker 1: was at a at the farmer's market with my mom
Speaker 1: as a kid, and they had rocky mountain oysters for sale,
Speaker 1: and I immediately was like, how do they have oysters
Speaker 1: from the rocky mountains? Because oysters are living the ocean
Speaker 1: and I'm I'm a smart kid, and I know there's
Speaker 1: no ocean in the mountains. And Mom had to explain
Speaker 1: to me, with a very embarrassed smile on her face,
Speaker 1: that that meant bowl testicles. And apparently, yeah, it's rocky
Speaker 1: mountain oysters or prairie oysters. Now we know, we all know. Uh,
Speaker 1: so you won't accidentally think you're eating mountain oysters. Sometime
Speaker 1: You're welcome. So Ornov is doing well. He decided to
Speaker 1: kick it up a notch by opening his own monkey
Speaker 1: farm in the Italian Riviera in ninety five. It was
Speaker 1: called Castle Vornov. He built a primate enclosure in the
Speaker 1: garden and hired a former circus animal keeper to run it.
Speaker 1: And he also had a small hospital built on the
Speaker 1: ground so that he could do operations right there, truly
Speaker 1: a farm to testicle operations. He was charging around ten
Speaker 1: thousand francs for this operation, just a little hard to
Speaker 1: convert to today's currency dollars, but according to Atlas Obscura,
Speaker 1: that was a year's salary for a chorus member at
Speaker 1: the Paris Opera. So some you know, just so you
Speaker 1: have a reference that you can make sense of, because
Speaker 1: we all know Um, with his inheritance from Evelyn and
Speaker 1: all this money coming in from the expensive operations, Voronoff
Speaker 1: lived in serious luxury, you know, lifestyles of the rich
Speaker 1: and famous. Yeah, here's the monkey ball doctor living in
Speaker 1: his beautiful home, paid for by the testicles of hundreds
Speaker 1: of monkeys, maybe eight thousands. Thanks monkeys. They're selfless sacrifice.
Speaker 1: I'm being told they were apes actually, which are far
Speaker 1: more intelligence even better. Wow. This guy occupied the entire
Speaker 1: first floor of one of Paris's most expensive hotels. He
Speaker 1: was accompanied by a bunch of chauffeurs and personal secretaries.
Speaker 1: He had valets, he had two mistresses. Was really living
Speaker 1: it up. He was making dough. But all this could
Speaker 1: not last forever. Oh serially, up said about that, you
Speaker 1: can't go get that surgery right now. No. In the
Speaker 1: early nineteen thirties, many of Wornof's patients were surprise showing
Speaker 1: signs of aging. See that's the trick with anti aging stuff,
Speaker 1: is that people, it works for you for about ten
Speaker 1: years and then and then you see what's happening exactly.
Speaker 1: And that gave the many skeptics around the world a
Speaker 1: lot of ammunition for their arguments against and that. I
Speaker 1: will say that he was very popular. You know, pop
Speaker 1: culture was all over it. There were still a lot
Speaker 1: of people who were like that don't sound real. But
Speaker 1: for enough explained that to his frustration, the gland graphs
Speaker 1: seemed to die off and stop being effective after three
Speaker 1: to five years, and while he could re rejuvenate his
Speaker 1: patients with another ten thousand franc operation, of course, it's
Speaker 1: always a solution that didn't work. Will just come play
Speaker 1: me to do with the get and then it'll work
Speaker 1: three or five years. Um No, he said, listen, I'm
Speaker 1: working on a longer lasting technique where he would test
Speaker 1: the blood of the monkey and of the patient and
Speaker 1: make sure they were compatible blood types, I guess, and
Speaker 1: he felt that if he could work that out, he
Speaker 1: claimed that his graft would help someone live to a
Speaker 1: hundred and forty years old, which is a very specific
Speaker 1: long number. But by scientists had isolated and identified testosterone,
Speaker 1: which Boredov had kind of been waiting for because he believed,
Speaker 1: you know, as we've talked about, he believed that the
Speaker 1: testicular gland secreted some kind of substance and once they
Speaker 1: figured out what it was, grafting surgery would no longer
Speaker 1: be required. They would have the substance they could use instead.
Speaker 1: So he kind of expected the discovery of testosterone to
Speaker 1: back up his theories. He said, if patients were given
Speaker 1: injections of testosterone, they would become young, strong, and virile.
Speaker 1: But when his hypothesis was tested, of course, testosterone injections
Speaker 1: were not found to prolong life or help with anti aging.
Speaker 1: They just kind of boosted up some secondary sex characteristics.
Speaker 1: But that's kind of it. So what ironically, given Voronof's
Speaker 1: obsession with ball sacks, it's actually estrogen that has wrinkle
Speaker 1: decreasing properties. Oh, he was looking in the wrong place
Speaker 1: for his anti aging. So Voronov's grafting theories fell out
Speaker 1: of favor and he stopped performing surgeries, but he continued
Speaker 1: to work at Castle Varnof, trying to cure other human
Speaker 1: ailments that he refused to name. Voronoff did have to
Speaker 1: flee the Nazis before the outbreak of World War Two,
Speaker 1: but then he was called back to France in nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty nine to become a surgeon. Once the war was over,
Speaker 1: he went back to Castle Varnoff, but it had been
Speaker 1: decimated by bombing, and you know, unfortunately no word on
Speaker 1: what happened to the monkeys. Like to think. I like
Speaker 1: to think that a bomb landed like Pirates of the
Speaker 1: Caribbean style, just busted a hole open and didn't kill anyone.
Speaker 1: They just were able to scape. Yeah, and they've traveled
Speaker 1: to Rome and they overthrew the Italian government. They've been
Speaker 1: ruling there ever since since. Now. Vorenov wanted to rebuild
Speaker 1: his castle, but he never did. In nineteen fifty one,
Speaker 1: he died in Switzerland from complications from a fall, possibly
Speaker 1: from pneumonia or a blood clot that might have traveled
Speaker 1: to his brain, which was just like how Margaret wise
Speaker 1: Brown died throwback. Now he was wealthy, but he had
Speaker 1: been discredited. Yeah, he never did rejuvenate himself, even though
Speaker 1: he said he would when he needed to. But I
Speaker 1: guess I guess when the needle got too close to
Speaker 1: his balls he decided. You know, I'd rather be old.
Speaker 1: I never all thought from this angle, and I don't
Speaker 1: like it. I can't believe you will let me do
Speaker 1: this so many times. You're insane. Voronoff was outlived by
Speaker 1: his third wife, Gertie Schwartz, who was believed by some
Speaker 1: to be the illegitimate daughter of King Carol of Romania.
Speaker 1: For all you, King Carol stands out there, King Carol,
Speaker 1: I love. I don't know why, but it makes me
Speaker 1: think of the King Vitamin's cereal box. I don't know why.
Speaker 1: But vitamin cereal did you talking about? Well, I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't know if anyone else knows what it is.
Speaker 1: It might be a generic like dollar store cereal, but
Speaker 1: we used to have it in our house. Um knock off.
Speaker 1: I guess King Vitamin anyway, unimportant. And now most newspapers
Speaker 1: when Borough died, they kind of acted like he had
Speaker 1: never been taken seriously. They didn't. Many papers didn't report
Speaker 1: on his death at all, which is sort of shitty
Speaker 1: because they were the ones being like, look at this
Speaker 1: great guy. And in the ninety nineties, some scientists tried
Speaker 1: to say that Ornof's experiments actually transmitted the HIV AIDS
Speaker 1: virus from monkeys to humans, like it was all his fault,
Speaker 1: but a paper by Peter Bogick, Stephen Selman, and Michael A.
Speaker 1: Rees debunked that claim. They said, quote consent sys among
Speaker 1: virologists holds that HIV most likely originated from a chimpanzee
Speaker 1: virus known as Simian immuno deficiency viruses, which many agree
Speaker 1: was transmitted to humans during the hunting of primates in
Speaker 1: the early nineteen hundreds. HIV isolate studies show that s
Speaker 1: i v was most likely transferred to humans from a
Speaker 1: chimpanzee species different from those used by war Enough. Again,
Speaker 1: horrible irony there that while we were hunting for primates
Speaker 1: to do all of our experiments on, we gave ourselves
Speaker 1: a terrible virus, you know what I mean? Anyway, McGill
Speaker 1: University says that the doctor's experiments might be laughable, but
Speaker 1: actually he did make important contributions to modern endochronology, biology,
Speaker 1: and hormone replacement therapy, but quote his monkey transplants, however,
Speaker 1: join the ranks of medical oddities the scientific community would
Speaker 1: rather forget. So, you know, we all have good and
Speaker 1: bad things we've done, right, it's just a good you know,
Speaker 1: it's a really interesting story to look into because of
Speaker 1: how much people believed this science and how much the
Speaker 1: scientists were believing it. You know, the Scientific American article
Speaker 1: was basically talking about Ivanov specifically to point out bad
Speaker 1: science when when science goes bad, because they were kind
Speaker 1: of like, this guy was funded by political political machine
Speaker 1: to reach a certain conclusion. That's what they wanted him
Speaker 1: to get to his hypothesis, rather than disprove it, rather
Speaker 1: than you know, really maybe really look at research that
Speaker 1: disproved it. They're like, we want you to make it
Speaker 1: work exactly and and towards a political end. So they
Speaker 1: were talking a lot about what happens when science gets
Speaker 1: caught up in politics, who's funding what and why all
Speaker 1: that kind of contributing to bad science. And this is
Speaker 1: a really good example, both of these guys. They're a
Speaker 1: really good example of that. But Voronoff, I get, I
Speaker 1: get the impression. I don't know if you feel this
Speaker 1: way or not having researched all this, that Vornoff wasn't
Speaker 1: necessarily snake oiling here. Like I think he believed what
Speaker 1: he was doing. Yeah, and and so like you said,
Speaker 1: like that pursuit, which he probably I don't know how
Speaker 1: he could have had more knowledge than he did on it,
Speaker 1: because you know, we learned afterwards. Well, that was a
Speaker 1: dumb idea. There's a lot of hindsight and science that
Speaker 1: makes stuff look stupid and silly, like what were you thinking?
Speaker 1: But somebody had to try it, um, you know, to
Speaker 1: learn and and I while I think that the idea
Speaker 1: is ludicrous, and I'm not happy with the idea of
Speaker 1: the rampant animal abuse um and the embedded racism and
Speaker 1: eugenics behind a lot of it and everything like that. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, there are some really gross sounding science things
Speaker 1: that have ended up being tremendously beneficial. Know. First one
Speaker 1: pops into my head is like eating termites. You know,
Speaker 1: they're like cultures that are like if you came to
Speaker 1: me and said, I wonder if I could eat this bug,
Speaker 1: I would say that's an insane thing. Why would you
Speaker 1: experiment with that? Don't do that? But somewhere for a
Speaker 1: long time people been making making healthy meals. True bugs
Speaker 1: all on crickets and stuff follow on crickets. So, I
Speaker 1: mean that's a good point too, is that you're like,
Speaker 1: you know, it's really easy to laugh now, but at
Speaker 1: the time they really didn't know. I mean, they had
Speaker 1: just learned that there was even any kind of connection
Speaker 1: between primates and humans, and they were trying to figure
Speaker 1: out what that really meant for us. So you have
Speaker 1: to try a lot of weird ship. So and I
Speaker 1: think Ivanov similarly, it was not necessarily snake oiling. I
Speaker 1: think he really did believe, like there's something useful here
Speaker 1: for my country, for my my for humanity overall. You know,
Speaker 1: I don't I don't think there's a lot of malice
Speaker 1: in either of them, but it anyway, yeah, hard to say.
Speaker 1: I'm very fascinating. Felt a little more his felt little,
Speaker 1: I mean, not not intentional malice, but that kind of
Speaker 1: eugenics idea of like, well, if I just made everyone
Speaker 1: a little stupider by breeding them with apes, that we'd
Speaker 1: have a better society because people would stop wanting things
Speaker 1: for themselves. Yeah, totally got a better world, well for whom, which, again,
Speaker 1: I mean just kind of tells you, like how politics
Speaker 1: influences science sometimes in a very very bad way. It doesn't,
Speaker 1: it doesn't give us anything. You know, that didn't contribute
Speaker 1: much to anyone, but we got our giant super cheep
Speaker 1: out of it, at least, thank god, that's what everybody
Speaker 1: was really look at for. Just create a Soviet army
Speaker 1: of super sheep. Well, and then also, I will say
Speaker 1: scientific American because he did have that gross idea to
Speaker 1: insciminate those women without your consents, and that's really gross,
Speaker 1: and they Scientific American pointed out. Quote, while there was
Speaker 1: apparently no overt racism in his research, his decision to
Speaker 1: inseminate African women without their knowledge or consent can only
Speaker 1: be understood in the context of a racist and sexist
Speaker 1: colonial attitude. So again, if you're looking at science in history,
Speaker 1: you kind of have to look at the overall everything
Speaker 1: else going on in that, you know, That's why it was.
Speaker 1: I guess it wasn't super relevant, but it was important
Speaker 1: to know. Like, not that long before all, this was
Speaker 1: when Charles Darwin was publishing his Theories of Evolution that
Speaker 1: just like blew everyone's mind. So it changed everything. And
Speaker 1: poor monkeys of poor apes, they suffered a lot, and
Speaker 1: they still do. I will say that that we still
Speaker 1: experiment on apes all the time and they are treated
Speaker 1: very poorly. And there's I mean, there's that's a can
Speaker 1: of worms right there. Because there's a lot of questions about, well,
Speaker 1: where has it brought us in? How many people have
Speaker 1: lived much better lives because of it? You know, I'm
Speaker 1: I don't have a solution. I don't want to start
Speaker 1: experimenting on people because of course you're gonna pick poor people,
Speaker 1: You're gonna pick desperate people, You're gonna pake criminals. I mean,
Speaker 1: you're gonna do horrible human rights violations or animal rights violations.
Speaker 1: You know. It's just there's no good way, it feels like.
Speaker 1: But I actually have a good way, and it's I
Speaker 1: take I take my two index fingers and I bring
Speaker 1: them up to the side of my head and then
Speaker 1: I put them into my ears and I make this sound.
Speaker 1: La la la la la la la la la la
Speaker 1: la la la. Oh my god, that is helping I
Speaker 1: feel so much. It's like all the solutions are there.
Speaker 1: We can assume what a better world? What a better world? Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: so that is our that is our bal Sack story.
Speaker 1: For today our scrotum story. Yeah, thanks for and for
Speaker 1: this one. You know, it's one of those things where
Speaker 1: it's sometimes sometimes there's a true love story here. Other
Speaker 1: times it's the story of sex and reproduction and how
Speaker 1: how we navigate those as a species or as multiple
Speaker 1: species the case. Maybe I also I want to know
Speaker 1: what about the twenties specifically where all these old guys
Speaker 1: were like, I'm gonna live forever. I want to be
Speaker 1: young again, Like was it just something like coming out
Speaker 1: of a world war? They were like, I you know
Speaker 1: what I mean, I want to go back to my
Speaker 1: youth like different or I don't know. Yeah, on one hand,
Speaker 1: maybe there is that like I missed my youth and
Speaker 1: I want it back, or everything's booming right now, so
Speaker 1: I will yes, I want this forever. I can get
Speaker 1: land in Florida. But I will argue that I don't think.
Speaker 1: You know, there's science crazes at different points in history,
Speaker 1: but I don't think this ever really goes away. I
Speaker 1: think there's always rich people, I mean all people. I'm
Speaker 1: not rich, and I think of it all the time,
Speaker 1: like how could I live forever? You know, I got
Speaker 1: my night cream? You know, anti wrinkles. I'm interested. I would.
Speaker 1: I think we've talked about this, like you know, the
Speaker 1: vampire quandary about like, oh you'd live forever but lonely,
Speaker 1: you know you'd be lonely. I'm lonely. Now, I'll do it.
Speaker 1: I'm here, I am sitting right here. I want to
Speaker 1: see some stuff. I want to see this stupid Marvel
Speaker 1: Marvel series to its end, which you know is going
Speaker 1: to outlive us all true, true, we have to watch
Speaker 1: its inevitable decline. Right, Yeah, yeah, I'm down for that.
Speaker 1: I'd rather see it than not, right. I like, you
Speaker 1: can be like the original first ten years was great. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's I would love to have a hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: years from now be saying you guys will never have
Speaker 1: anything as good as The Winter Soldier like Jesus Boomer.
Speaker 1: I mean it will be millennial, millennial, millennial, this millennious,
Speaker 1: thousand year old millennials still going on about the Infinity saga. Jeez,
Speaker 1: we're all over it, old man. I guess that's what
Speaker 1: I Potter reboot, that's what we're excited about now. Well,
Speaker 1: I guess that's what I wonder is if you live forever,
Speaker 1: A do you not feel I mean, because that's part
Speaker 1: of aging, right, getting older. It's not just that your
Speaker 1: body gets older, but like your mind does and you
Speaker 1: start to feel like the world's moving on and you'r
Speaker 1: Isn't that what we do in the Shadows is all about,
Speaker 1: is that they're sort of like cannot modernize themselves because
Speaker 1: that's just how it is. To just got to keep
Speaker 1: it fresh, like I do. You know, you just gotta
Speaker 1: stay funky. You just got to be in touch with
Speaker 1: the kids and the lingo, you know, be groovy, like
Speaker 1: you can walk around. Yeah, that's going to be yea,
Speaker 1: you know, the kids and me, like we're on the
Speaker 1: same page. Oh yeah, any kids listening, please, let's let's
Speaker 1: tell you. I know, if y'all are on the same
Speaker 1: poo and they're going to be like, what's a page? True,
Speaker 1: I'm just kidding, y'all know what pages are? Yeah? Microsoft program?
Speaker 1: Well anyway, do let us know what you think about this,
Speaker 1: if you would like to live forever or not. I
Speaker 1: would be interested in your opinions, because I do feel
Speaker 1: that people would get bored with the world. But maybe
Speaker 1: you're right. Boredom is maybe a sign of low intelligence
Speaker 1: and not trying that hard. So if you really were
Speaker 1: out there learning pottery and doing ship like you could
Speaker 1: live forever and be very happy. What do you think?
Speaker 1: I'd love to know your thoughts about all this nut
Speaker 1: sex stuff, So yeah, send us an email riddic Romance
Speaker 1: at gmail dot com or hit us up on Twitter
Speaker 1: and Instagram. I'm at Oh great, it's Eli. I'm at
Speaker 1: Dynamite Food and the show is at ridic Romance And
Speaker 1: we really appreciate you listening. We love spending time with
Speaker 1: you and hearing from you, and I hope you enjoyed
Speaker 1: this story. That's right, well, catch all the next one.
Speaker 1: So long, friends, it's time to go. Thanks so listening
Speaker 1: to our show, tell your friends names uncles, and this
Speaker 1: is to listen to what's so ridiculous? Well mans,