Are man-ape hybrids possible with gentic manipulation or is it stll in the realm of science fiction?

I’m not sure where science stands today in it’s ability to create hybrid creatures. I know they have goats making spider silk in their milk, pigs growing human organs and fish and kittens that glow with firefly genes, but is it possible to create a man-chimpanzee hybrid or is the genetic differentiation too great?

It would certainly be possible to splice some genes from a human into a chimpanzee, or vice-versa. In this case, you’d have a chimpanzee that produced one or two proteins normally produced by humans, much like the other examples you posted. It wouldn’t be what you would think of as a “hybrid”, though.

By extension, it should be possible to splice in a bunch of genes - maybe even half the genome of one creature, eventually. The problem is incompatibilities - many genes code for proteins that are part of a complex interacting mechanism that requires the other proteins to be there. Human and ape genomes were once shared many million years in the past, but there has been a lot of drift since then.

Today, if there was funding and a lack of concern for any ethical issues, we could certainly try making hybrid embryos, but you would expect that most of them would fail to grow properly due to these incompatibilities. It would probably take many tries to get a viable hybrid, and it might be impossible until we have more understanding of the underlying problems.

Short answer: We don’t know.

Long answer: Do a search. We’ve had this discussion at least a dozen times.

My own take: I’m not aware of any large mammals that are as closely related as humans and chimps are that are known not to be inter-fertile, and there are known species that are less closely related and which are inter-fertile, so it would not surprise me if it were possible.

Don’t let the different chromosome numbers confuse you. It’s a possible hinderance, but not a deal breaker. Horses and donkeys have different chromosome counts and our chromosome #2 is a fused version of 2 non-human ape chromosomes.

It may be possible to create a man-great ape hybrid, but they must be fairly close to the limit on what is possible for mammalian hybrids. For example the llama and the dromedary camel’s evolutionary line is estimated to have split about 11 million years ago, yet it they have been successfully hybridized (via artificial insemination); humans and chimpanzees are estimated to have split about 6 million years ago.

But it’s more subtle than that. What’s important is not so much the “time from split”, but the number of generation. Humans and chimps have very long reproductive cycles compared to most other mammals, and so have fewer generations in any given time interval.

Also, to complicate things, there was some data a few years ago that there were 2 splits in the human/chimp lines-- one at 10M years ago and then a period when the lines merged again around 6M years before splitting again. I’m not sure if that is considered scientific consensus, but these things can be more complicate than one might think.

I wonder if it would be easier to make a man-ape hybrid if you used chromosomes only from one or the other for each chromosome number. For example, Chromosome pairs 1 - 12 from a human, and pairs 13 - 22 plus X and Y from a chimp.

ETA: Or maybe most chromosome pairs from one, with one or two numbered pairs from the other.

I don’t think that has ever been done with any animal, so not so sure it would be “easier”. It also would be an erratic hybrid, where it might have whole pieces of each species rather than a blend of the two where some elements are intermediate. It could also cause problems in areas like brain growth if you didn’t have the proper genes to regulate for skull development.

Concerning your ETA, that would only be a partial hybrid. Probably the easiest way to produce a hybrid would be to make a chimera. But that wouldn’t be a real hybrid either.

There’s no particular functional relationship between the genes carried on one chromosome, so this is unlikely to make it easier. In fact, having one full set of chromosomes from each parent is probably more likely to produce a viable hybrid, since there will be a full set of interrelated genes from each species.

If we were serious about doing this, I think the first step would be to try and create a chimp/gorilla hybrid. If that could be done, it would strongly imply that a chimp/human hybrid was possible. Plus, we’d be doing a lot of the learning on non-humans.

Chimps are closer to humans than they are to gorillas, though. It might be easier in the sense of a shorter generation time, and it’d certainly be easier to get past the ethics board, but a failure of a chimp/gorilla crossing wouldn’t say anything about a chimp/human crossing.

How about chimp / orangutan? That would be closer.

No, the orangutan is even less related. Chimps and bonobos are closely related to each other and can certainly cross-breed, and the next closest organism to those two is humans.

I think the 3 are so closely related that it probably would. But I was thinking more of the positive result and the fact that it would not be particularly controversial to do, as long as no wild chimps or gorillas were used.

But the hybrid apes would eventually take over the world. What would we do then?

When winter time comes around, the hybrid gorillas simply freeze to death.

Hah! We evil scientists plan to use Mountain Gorillas. Mwu-ha-ha-ha-ha!

There seem to be two different questions being discussed here:
(1) Could we create a primate hybrid the old fashioned way, via inserting tab A into slot B?
(2) If not, are there molecular biological tools available that would allow us to get around the problem and create one artificially?

As to (1), I think the consensus amongst biologists (although I should say this is way outside of my area) is that it wouldn’t be terribly surprising, scientifically, if we managed to create a human-chimp hybrid, given enough time, effort, and luck. It certainly would be very surprising to find out that someone had done the experiment. Surprising and troubling. And I don’t think there are many people out there eager to see the experiment done.

As to (2), I’d say that’s still firmly in the realm of science fiction. Firstly, genetic engineering on primates isn’t really a thing yet, as far as I’m aware. We don’t have the tools and techniques to do very much on humans and near relatives. People casually throw out ideas like, “Oh, just take a few chromosomes from here and mix them with a few from there…” without any real sense of just how difficult it is to do such a thing.
Secondly, I think people are underestimating just how many problems are likely to arise from mixing two genomes like this, even closely related genomes. If the problem boils down to, say, one single incompatible gene interaction, then perhaps it could be tackled. But much more than that and we’re outside of what we know how to do.

Then who will kill our snakes?

Chimtangupants!

And I can’t believe the thread went this long with no mention of Monkubines.