Stalin and GE Pioneering...

Scotsman.com - Stalin's half-man, half-ape super-warriors

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.

Moreover....

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.

Intriguing. The AIDS virus is thought to have crossed from monkeys to humans in the early 1930's, somewhere in West Africa. Conspiracy theories often postulate that AIDS is a CIA experiment gone wrong (or right, according to taste) ; could AIDS really be an inadvertant result of Stalin's genetic experiment?