Science: Ape-Child?

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Physiologists convening in Stockholm all but forgot other topics in a furore created by Dr. Serge Voronoff, famed gland-grafter. Last fortnight, Dr. Voronoff told Frenchmen about his extra-heavy three-glanded Algerian rams (TIME, Aug. 9). To his Swedish hosts he revealed that he had grafted within Nora, a mature female chimpanzee, the sex organs of a human female. Then, with assistance from Dr. Elie Ivanoff of Moscow, he had artificially impregnated Nora with human sperms. She was to bear her baby in January and it would be, biologically, a human child. To date, she was progressing normally.

Those of Dr. Voronoff's listeners who were not skeptical were reported as being "highly shocked," but no more shocked than other squeamish persons had been at Dr. Elie Ivanoff's announcement, earlier in the year (TIME, June 28), that he is to try breeding (artificially) orang-outangs with yellow, gorillas with black, and chimpanzees with white, humans, at the Pasteur Institute of Kindia, French West Africa, to try to demonstrate the close relation of human and ape stocks.