Journal #2What is a chimera? Do you

think chimeras are/were real? Do you think

chimeras do or can exist today? Why or why not?

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Chimera1.A mythological, fire-breathing monster,

commonly represented with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail.

2.Any similarly grotesque monster having disparate parts, especially as depicted in decorative art.

3.A horrible or unreal creature of the imagination.

4.An organism composed of two or more genetically distinct tissues, as an organism that is partly male and partly female, or an artificially produced individual having tissues of several species.

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Real ScienceReal-life Dr. Frankensteins

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Giovanni Aldini 1762-

1834

*scientific work mostly with galvanism and its medical implications, Illumination of light houses, and preserving human life and material objects from the effects of fire.

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• Traveled all over Europe publicly electrifying human and animal bodies...very theatrical

• 1802 went to London and performed on human and ox heads and produced repeated spasmodic movements of the facial muscles, arms, and legs

• Stimulated the heads and trunks of cows, horses, sheep, and dogs

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• An eyewitness reported: "Aldini, after having cut off the head of a dog, makes the current of a strong battery go through it: the mere contact triggers really terrible convulsions. The jaws open, the teeth chatter, the eyes roll in their sockets; and if reason did not stop the fired imagination, one would almost believe that the animal is suffering and alive again".

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• Among the first to treat mentally ill patients with shocks to the brain, claiming complete electrical cures for several mental illnesses

• Most famous experiment in 1803 at the Royal College of Surgeons on a hanged man named George Forster

• took a pair of conducting rods linked to a powerful battery, and touched the rods to various parts of the body. When the rods were applied to Forster’s mouth and ear, “the jaw began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and the left eye actually opened.” When one rod was moved to touch the rectum, the whole body convulsed: indeed, the movements were “so much increased as almost to give an appearance of re-animation”.8

Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov

1870-1932*soviet biologist who developed a method for artificially inseminating domestic animals

* successfully created a hybrid horse by cross breeding a zebra and wild horse

* approached by Stalin to create a super-warrior by cross breeding humans with apes

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Stalin is said to have told Ivanov, ‘I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat.’ In 1926 Ivanov was sent to West Africa with many thousands of dollars to conduct experiments in impregnating chimpanzees by artificial insemination. In the USSR, a centre was set up in Georgia, Stalin’s birthplace, for the ‘apes’ to be raised.

Ivanov’s experiments in Africa were a total failure. Further experiments in Georgia to use monkey sperm in human volunteers also. For his expensive failure, he was sentenced to five years’ jail, commuted to five years’ exile in Kazakhstan, where he died in 1932, aged 61.10

Vladimir Demikhov1916-1998* soviet scientist and transplant pioneer

* conducted several transplants in the 1930s and1950s, his most famous of which were his transplants of the heads of dogs, which resulted in two-headed dogs.

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*The head of a puppy was grafted onto the neck of an adult German shepherd. The second head would lap at milk, even though it did not need nourishment — and though the milk then dribbled down the neck from its disconnected esophagus. Although both animals soon died because of tissue rejection, that did not stop Demikhov from creating 19 more over the next 15 years.

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Robert J. White1926-2010

In the 70s, performed a transplant of one monkey head onto the body of another monkey. It survived a few days. The operations were perfected to a point where the transplanted head could survive indefinitely, but the animals were euthanized.

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Essential Question:If all this possible back then, what are our scientists doing now? Just because they can, does that mean

they should?

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