“Medical research using chimpanzee surrogates is not just a hot issue, made hotter in recent years by the rise of animal-rights movement and, in counterpoint, by the terror AIDS. It's also... a central conundrum within the much larger issue of humanity's relationship to nature. It's bigger than AIDS; it's bigger than the enterprise of according legalistic 'rights' to a few thousand species of vertebrates. By a sequence of almost syllogisticallly linked questions, it leads straight to the core of a very personal yet very global matter - whether we humans are really part of the natural world or not. It demands eventually that we ask ourselves, Is a human life sacred, or just valuable? And the corollary, If a valuable entity proliferates itself by a factor of six billion, is each unit still as valuable as it was?” HumanityHumanAnimal RightsRole In The World Book:The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder Source: The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder