In pursuit of youth, people stop at nothing. This has been the case at all times. The science of rejuvenation holds many secrets. Adventurism, politics and money are mixed here. Big politics and very big money …
Living water and rejuvenating apples
The secret of preserving youth has fascinated people for a long time - it's not for nothing that different nations have tales about young apples and living water. Medieval alchemists generally tried to create an elixir of immortality. They made many interesting discoveries, but did not achieve the desired goal.
Not wanting to grow old, people drank doubtful decoctions, swallowed crushed vitriol. French doctors took blood from young men and transfused it to elders, the British tried injections of the bone marrow of newborn lambs, extracts from the genital glands of guinea pigs …
In the late 19th - early 20th centuries, rejuvenation experiments finally yielded certain positive results. This happened thanks to the surgeon Samuil Obramovich Voronov, who became the prototype of Professor Preobrazhensky from the novel “Heart of a Dog” by M. Bulgakov.
The Wizard from "Castle of the Monkeys"
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Voronov was born in 1866 in Russia, but at the age of 18 he ended up in France, where he graduated from the medical faculty at the Sorbonne. For many years he was the physician of the Khedive, the viceroy of Egypt. Observing the eunuchs, Voronov made interesting conclusions about the influence of the gonads on the structure of the human skeleton, the processes of obesity, the ability to think and remember. People undergoing castration showed signs of aging early. This led Voronov to think about a genital gland transplant in order to rejuvenate. For this purpose, he decided to use monkeys.
Returning to Paris, Voronov performed 150 successful operations on animals, and then moved on to humans. He transplanted monkey gonads to his patients, among whom was his brother George, who suffered from depression.
Only very rich people could afford a rejuvenation operation, since Voronov's fees were extremely high. Soon the surgeon acquired a luxurious villa on the Cote d'Azur, called the "Castle of the Monkeys". There are laboratories, operating rooms, patient rooms, and spacious monkey enclosures on the green lawns. Having operated on 236 people aged 55-70 years, Voronov received a positive result in 90% of cases. He wrote, "The time is not far off when monkey gland transplants will mark significant progress in human therapy."
40 year olds
However, time has shown that everything is not as brilliant as Voronov would like. The effect of surgery disappeared over time, and in some cases, patients even died. Only it was not advertised. Only fantastic successes were reported, the rumor of which reached Russia, where at that time the head of state was dying, struck by "wear sclerosis". Voronov was invited to Moscow to help Lenin cope with the disease. The negotiations took so long that the leader died without waiting for the rejuvenation operation.
But the issue of rejuvenation turned out to be relevant not only for Lenin - the aging guard of the Central Committee also needed "young blood". Those who ruled the country, according to the Kremlin psychiatrist Aaron Zalkin, needed urgent help. “According to my observations,” he wrote, “the activists of the Bolshevik Party, who have shouldered the burden of remaking society, are rapidly dying out. Those who are only 30 years old carry the illnesses of a 45-year-old, 40-year-olds are already quite old people. What can we say about those who have long crossed the critical threshold and are at the same time at the helm of the Soviet country?"
During this period, Soviet scientists were already conducting experiments on blood transfusions from young proletarians to party veterans who were beginning to grow old. For the same purpose, the sex glands were transplanted from people who died young. But none of the Soviet doctors managed to achieve the results that Voronov achieved. And the Central Committee decided to implement his method. The practical implementation of the problem was entrusted to Vladimir Nikolaevich Rozanov, the best Moscow surgeon.
Having figured out the essence of the matter, Rozanov sent a notification to the Institute of Experimental Endocrinology, which said that it was necessary to acquire 50 monkeys. “The breeds are preferably larger: hamadryas, baboons, at least two chimpanzees. Monkeys are needed for experiments on them and for the transplantation of endocrine glands to humans."
To the tropics - for the monkeys
It was possible to get monkeys only in Africa, where they sent Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov, a famous zoologist, student of I. P. Pavlova. The choice fell on him not by chance. This man with a little wedge beard, who looked like the good doctor Aibolit, dreamed, like Victor Frankenstein from Mary Shelley's novel, to create a new person using a unique technique.
He saw his path in crossing a man with a monkey, and from the first steps of his scientific activity he tried to conduct experiments on crossing humans and anthropoid apes.
The chemical department of the Revolutionary Military Council became interested in his ideas, believing that the creatures created by the scientist could be used for experiments on the effect on humans of X-rays, toxic substances, and even as free labor at the construction sites of socialism … Thanks to the support of this respectable institution, Ivanov, despite the difficult economic situation The Soviets in the period of collectivization, the state allocated 291,912 dollars, and "Doctor Aibolit" went to the tropics for monkeys.
In 1927 Ivanov returned to Russia with two Anubis baboons, two hamadryas and a male chimpanzee. The ship on which the valuable cargo was delivered moored in Sukhumi, and the monkeys were released into the open-air cages prepared for them - this is how the famous nursery appeared in the USSR, where the living conditions of the animals were close to natural.
Everything seemed to be going well. But here Ivanov was accused of aiding the international bourgeoisie and espionage. In 1931 he was first sent to a camp and then to exile for a period of five years. So the scientist ended up in Alma-Ata, where he was allowed to work, and he took the position of professor at the Department of Animal Physiology at the Kazakh Veterinary Zootechnical Institute. In March 1932, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Monkeyman is real
And recently the name of Ilya Ivanov has surfaced again in scientific discussions. A unique document was found in the funds of the State Archive of Russia - a draft resolution of the commission created in 1929 at the scientific department of the USSR Council of People's Commissars. It said that in the Sukhumi nursery, Ivanov was instructed not only to continue experiments on crossing between individual species of monkeys, but also to conduct experiments on crossing monkeys with humans and hybridization experiments by artificially fertilizing a woman with anthropoid sperm.
If successful, a number of issues were resolved: proof of the absence of higher forces in the origin of man, the complete subordination of nature to the will of man and, most importantly, obtaining hybrids capable of living in specially designated areas, eating food waste, performing any work, obeying implicitly and giving offspring.
… Is it possible in principle to interbreed humans and monkeys? Here is the opinion of the Belgian scientist B. Ey-Welmans: “First, it should be clarified that the crossing of anthropoids and human beings is possible, especially if we restrict ourselves to two large African monkeys - a gorilla and a chimpanzee. Hybridization implies sufficient correspondence between genomes, namely, between the number and structure of chromosomes, and in this case it is. It is just possible to imagine that a human being with its 46 chromosomes, combining with a great ape with 48 chromosomes, can give rise to a hybrid with 47 chromosomes, which, however, due to the odd number of chromosomes will be sterile and will not be able to give birth."
Thus, the creation of the ape-man is removed from the agenda. However, another scientific idea came to replace it - cloning. Who knows what surprises this path has in store for us?