Whilst reading this article at Pravda (not the BBC) about bigfoot sightings in the Kemerovo region of Russia, I came across this rather odd paragraph :

Vladimir Rosanov, a famous surgeon who extracted SS bullets out of Lenin’s body, requested 50 apes for experiments in transplantation of vascular glands to the aging leaders of the revolution (first of all, Stalin). Rozanov hoped to repeat the success of his colleague Sergei Voronov, who immigrated to France in the 19th century where in a luxurious palace on French Riviera nicknamed The Simian castle he transplanted apes’ genital glands to wealthy patients. He had 90% success rate in body rejuvenation.

Apart from the rather amusing idea of Stalin being implanted with monkey gonads, the main thrust of the article is that the bigfoot sightings are the result of previous experiments involving crossing apes with humans.

The monkey testicles part is rather more interesting that the bigfoot aspect though and it seems that it was quite the thing in the early 1920’s (wiki article):

In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, trends in xenotransplantation included the work of Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard. In 1889, Voronoff injected himself under the skin with extracts from ground-up dog and guinea pig testicles. These experiments failed to produce the desired results of increased hormonal effects to retard aging.

Voronoff’s experiments launched from this starting point. He believed glandular transplants would produce more sustained effects than mere injections. Voronoff’s early experiments in this field included transplanting thyroid glands from chimpanzees to humans with thyroid deficiencies. He moved on to transplanting the testicles of executed criminals into millionaires, but, when demand outstripped supply, he turned to using monkey testicle tissue instead.

Between 1917 and 1926, Voronoff carried out over five hundred transplantations on sheep and goats, and also on a bull, grafting testicles from younger animals to older ones. Voronoff’s observations indicated that the transplantations caused the older animals to regain the vigor of younger animals. He also considered monkey-gland transplantation an effective treatment to counter senility.

His first official transplantation of a monkey gland into a human took place on June 12, 1920. Thin slices (a few millimetres wide) of testicles from chimpanzees and baboons were implanted inside the patient’s scrotum, the thinness of the tissue samples allowing the foreign tissue to fuse with the human tissue eventually.  By 1923, 700 of the world’s leading surgeons at the International Congress of Surgeons in London, England, applauded the success of Voronoff’s work in the “rejuvenation” of old men.

I am sure that one of the cosmetic companies is already trying that out as I write – Olay Simionad (think about it) sounds quite an effective face cream I think although when the users found out they were rubbing ground up monkey nuts on their faces it certainly wouldn’t end well.