"Look, I'm a Human"

Man's troubles really started when he got on his hind legs. So says Russian Biologist S. D. Antipin, until last week head of the department of general biology at the Kishinev Medical Institute.

"As the descendant of a four-legged animal, man is constructed on the horizontal principle," Antipin had told a group of workers. "By becoming vertical, he is [like] a steam engine rolling along on its back wheels ... By using artificial meat grinders instead of his own teeth, he has weakened his chewing equipment and acquired the toothache . . . Man's internal organs pile up one on top of the other like the floors of a building. This causes heart ailments . . .

"Monkeys have thin, pressed-in lips, while people have fleshy lips turned outward. It is not by chance that many ladies paint their lips: they are trying to say, 'Look, I'm a human, not a monkey.' "

Soviet officialdom decided to make it plain that good upright Communist bipeds would not be caught cavorting about on all fours. In Izvestia, Party Polemicist Boris Lavrenev reported that a look at Antipin's family tree revealed a wretched bourgeois background. The professor had fought the Red army as a member of Admiral Kolchak's White Guard in 1919. Obviously, Lavrenev concluded, Antipin was nothing but "a common adventurer, slavishly addicted to idiotic . . . ravings;"

This week the Soviet Ministry of Health announced that Adventurer Antipin had been fired.

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