Soviets Attempted Human/Chimp Hybrid

I found this little gem off of Poor Mojo's Newswire...

Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov was the first to actually attempt to create a human-ape hybrid. As early as 1910 he had given a presentation to the World Congress of Zoologists in Graz, Austria in which he described the possibility of obtaining such a hybrid through artificial insemination.
In 1924, while working at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, Ivanov obtained permission from the Institute's directors to use its experimental primate station in Kindia, French Guinea, for such an experiment. Ivanov attempted to gain backing for his project from the Soviet government.

... Ivanov's proposal finally sparked the interest of Nikolai Petrovich Gorbunov, the head of the Department of Scientific Institutions. In September 1925 Gorbunov helped allocate US$10,000 to the Academy of Sciences for Ivanov's human-ape hybridization experiments in Africa.
In March 1926 Ivanov arrived at the Kindia facility, but stayed only a month without success. The Kindia site, it turned out, had no sexually mature chimpanzees. He returned to France where he arranged through correspondence with French Guinea's colonial governor to set up experiments at the botanical gardens in Conakry.

... On February 28, 1927, Ivanov artificially inseminated two female chimpanzees with human sperm. On June 25, he injected a third chimpanzee with human sperm. The Ivanovs left Africa in July with thirteen chimps, including the three used in his experiments. They already knew before leaving that the first two chimpanzees had failed to become pregnant. The third died in France, and was also found not to have been pregnant. The remaining chimps were sent to a new primate station at Sukhumi.
Although Ivanov attempted to organize the insemination of human females with chimpanzee sperm in Guinea, these plans met with resistance from the French colonial government and there is no evidence such an experiment was arranged there.

Upon his return to the Soviet Union in 1927, Ivanov began an effort to organize hybridization experiments at Sukhumi using ape sperm and human females. Eventually in 1929, through the help of Gorbunov, he obtained the support of the Society of Materialist Biologists, a group associated with the Communist Academy. In the spring of 1929 the Society set up a commission to plan Ivanov's experiments at Sukhumi. They decided that at least five volunteer women would be needed for the project. However, in June 1929, before any inseminations had taken place, Ivanov learned that the only postpubescent male ape remaining at Sukhumi (an orangutan) had died. A new set of chimps would not arrive at Sukhumi until the summer of 1930.

These rumored Russian experiments are not the only ones. There have been many rumored instances of human/ape interbreeding. The most famous of these was Oliver, the man/ape who could speak sign language and preferred human females over female chimpanzees. He was never scientifically proven to be an ape hybrid, but he was not like the other chimpanzees.

The whole basis of hyridizing humans and chimps is because we share over 95% of our DNA sequence, and 99% of gene coding with them. It is technically feasible to create chimeras such as Chumans, or Humanzees. It would seem mankind has not learned the lessons taught us by the Planet of the Apes movie series. I guess we will have to learn the hard way.