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Helen and everyone, Just wanted to say real quick-like, I agree with Jeff, in that the best way we can thank those who have given their lives to research so that ours can be improved is to first simply respect their gift for a gift rather than as our just due as superior humans and then to make the most of our improved lives and enlightened perspectives by giving back to those around us. It's similar to the gift I received when my youngest brother died of cancer at 5. I wouldn't wish that fate on him any more/less than i would another human or animal, altho'' I would have gladly switched places with him (pre-pd anyway!). But I did receive a gift of strength and love which now helps me deal my own pd, and hopefully I can myself pass that gift on, and continue the cycle of giving life. WT Before I go, I thought I'd share this, which I personally find beautiful, and is hanging on the wall in front of me as I type: We need another and a wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlngs; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth. from THE OUTERMOST HOUSE by Henry Beston