Gee, it must be Stalin day at Classical Values....

Here's a news item for the bioethicists to ponder:

THE Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the creation of Planet of the Apes-style warriors by crossing humans with apes, according to recently uncovered secret documents.

Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia's top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior.

According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: "I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat."

In 1926 the Politburo in Moscow passed the request to the Academy of Science with the order to build a "living war machine". The order came at a time when the Soviet Union was embarked on a crusade to turn the world upside down, with social engineering seen as a partner to industrialisation: new cities, architecture, and a new egalitarian society were being created.

Mr Ivanov's ideas were music to the ears of Soviet planners and in 1926 he was dispatched to West Africa with $200,000 to conduct his first experiment in impregnating chimpanzees.

Meanwhile, a centre for the experiments was set up in Georgia - Stalin's birthplace - for the apes to be raised.

Mr Ivanov's experiments, unsurprisingly from what we now know, were a total failure. He returned to the Soviet Union, only to see experiments in Georgia to use monkey sperm in human volunteers similarly fail.

A final attempt to persuade a Cuban heiress to lend some of her monkeys for further experiments reached American ears, with the New York Times reporting on the story, and she dropped the idea amid the uproar.

From a genetic viewpoint, we're pretty damned close to chimpanzees:

Chimpanzees are believed by many scientists to be the closest relatives of humans. The genetic difference between the two species is estimated to be about 1.7 percent at the DNA level (less than that between horses and zebras). Recent progress in studies of DNA sequences, the fossil record, and brain functions support the idea that there is a sizeable gap separating chimpanzees and monkeys, but not chimpanzees and humans.

A very interesting article, headlined “New breed of half-ape ‘slave’ thought possible,” was published in the May 14, 1987, issue of the Houston Chronicle. Brunetto Chiarelli, dean of anthropology at Florence University, claimed that he had knowledge of a secret experiment in which a chimpanzee egg was exposed to human sperm with the result that an apparently viable embryo was created. The experiment was interrupted at the embryo stage because of ethical considerations. “Scientific information is numerous but reserved. Maybe at the end of the year we will have an idea of what has been achieved,” Chiarelli said. Apparently, the cell proceeded to divide; it was the beginning of a routine developmental process that could potentially have resulted in a human-chimpanzee hybrid.

As I see it, there are two different ethical issues; creation and destruction. If it is unethical to create such a life, would that make it ethical to destroy it?

In all probability, the creation would be more intelligent than its ape parent, and depending on how the genes lined up, it might even be capable of speech. It would not be human in the true sense, though, but I think its existence might tend to blur the distinction between humans and animals, possibly to the detriment of humans, and to the benefit of animal rights advocates. I'm sure a lot of people would be extremely upset, but I think the one I'd be most concerned about would be the poor creature itself, which would have had no say in its existence, but which would face a life of innumerable frustrations (including quite possibly being regularly targeted for killing). Whether that's an acceptable argument in favor of aborting the thing, I don't know. Would it matter whether the mother was human or ape? What if the mother was human, and had consented? (For whatever reason -- perhaps in order to advance the animal rights agenda....) One could argue that it had fewer legal rights than a human, but I think it would have more rights than an ape. The legal system is predicated on a distinction which would be challenged.

I'm glad I don't have to decide these things.

MORE: Last year, Harvard's Michael Sandel addressed the President's Commission on Bioethics on this very issue:

Imagine, said Robert Streiffer, a professor of philosophy and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, a human-chimpanzee chimera endowed with speech and an enhanced potential to learn — what some have called a "humanzee."

"There's a knee-jerk reaction that enhancing the moral status of an animal is bad," Streiffer said. "But if you did it, and you gave it the protections it deserves, how could the animal complain?"

Unfortunately, said Harvard political philosopher Michael J. Sandel, speaking last fall at a meeting of the President's Council on Bioethics, such protections are unlikely.

"Chances are we would make them perform menial jobs or dangerous jobs," Sandel said. "That would be an objection."

AND MORE: Rumors of the 1987 Italian ape-man experiment inspired a British film called "Monkey Boy" in 1991. (Released in the United States as "Chimera.")