Boingboing has a story this morning from
Scotsman.com about Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's attempts to cross humans and apes to make some kind of half man-half ape hybrid superwarrior.
Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia's top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior.
According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: "I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat."
I don't know about invincible, but the 'quality of food' requirement could have been satisfied much more cheaply by the average grad student.
(Or, as a particularly snarky aside, by the average Russian of the time)
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