Read Online Lucy by Laurence Gonzales - Free Book Online

would also overcome any potential incompatibility between mother and fetus due to antigenic sugars on the surface of the cells.
    “Therefore, employing conventional gene-splicing techniques, I managed to produce a live female bonobo, Leda, whose genetic profile was even closer to that of a human being than naturally born bonobos.”
    Jenny felt a chill run over her. “No,” she said aloud. She must be misunderstanding what he was talking about. She read on, her heart racing with excitement.
    “Leda is in every way morphologically indistinguishable from an ordinary bonobo, including her body hair, genitals, lack of speech, dark-hued sclera, and so on. And yet I have brought her just slightly closer to the human genotype so that, in my view, she should be more likely to produce a ‘virtually human’ child, that is, one who looks and thinks and talks like a human but who has certain of the advantageous features conferred by the bonobo genome.”
    “Oh, man, this is nuts,” Jenny heard herself say. She felt the hair stand up on her arms and neck as she wondered, Could this be a hoax? A scientist who’d fallen into obscurity, out to grab the spotlight for himself? Was he planning to publish this and create a sensation? Of course. That must be it. Or was this perhaps the ranting of some heart-of-darkness lunatic who’d gone mad out there in the bush? Jenny knew that anything was possible in Congo. But Stone certainly hadn’t looked or acted mad when she’d met him.
    Then again, others who were presumably not insane had actually attempted it. Jenny vaguely knew the details from a class about AIDS that she’d taken as a graduate student. A biologist named Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov was sent by the Russian Academy of Sciences to Africa in 1926. The purpose of his trip was to inseminate female chimpanzees with human sperm. The effort had been supported by the Institut Pasteur in Paris, which kept captive chimpanzees at Kindia in what was then French Guinea. Ivanov, who pioneered the techniques of artificial insemination, had already done extensive work creating hybrid animals when he introduced the idea of a human hybrid at the International Zoology Congress that was being held at Graz in 1910. In fact, Ivanov ultimately did inseminate three chimpanzees, but none of them became pregnant. It was an ugly time, in which local hunters killed chimpanzee parents and brought the children to the scientists at Kindia. The researchers were unaware that it took chimpanzees eight or ten years to reach puberty. Once Ivanov had realized his mistake and obtained mature females, the brutal procedures he used to inseminate them were likened to rape by later researchers. His failure to impregnate any of the female chimpanzees led him to ask for permission to inseminate human women with chimpanzee sperm in a hospital in Congo—without informing them of what was being done. Although there’s no evidence in the literature that the women were actually inseminated with sperm from an ape, the AIDS pandemic was genetically traced to west equatorial Africa and first appeared in humans around 1931. Before that, the HIV virus was found exclusively in apes. The grad school professor who taught the course that Jenny took believed there was a connection.
    In the period from the early 1900s through the 1920s, several European scientists attempted to create a human-ape hybrid. In Russia, biologists even organized the Commission on Interspecific Hybridization of Primates to oversee the job of making a human-ape baby. Indeed, among scientists on both sides of the Atlantic, there seemed to be no strong objection to the idea at that time. More recently, in the 1970s, J. Michael Bedford had shown that a human sperm could penetrate a female ape’s ovum under laboratory conditions. Jenny thought it was an interesting concept. But the more rational part of her, the scientist, said, No. No one would do that today, because of all the ethical issues involved. Besides,