July 20] 1870 – March 20, 1932) was a Russian and Soviet biologist who specialized in the field of artificial insemination and the interspecific hybridization of animals.

In the course of a general political shakeup in the Soviet scientific world, Ivanov and several scientists involved in primate research and experiments lost their positions.

[2] 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 1929, after returning to the Soviet Union, he attempted to organize a set of experiments involving nonhuman ape sperm and human volunteers but was delayed by the death of his last orangutan.

[citation needed] His work was one of the sources of inspiration for the unfinished satirical opera Orango whose Prologue was sketched in 1932 by Dmitri Shostakovich with a libretto by Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy and Alexander Osipovich Starchakov but the whole was later abandoned and discarded.