New Delhi, Oct. 5 -- Not very long ago, humans saw themselves as special animals because they could use tools. But in 1960, British scientist Jane Goodall observed that chimpanzees could use blades of grass to extract termites from a nest, to eat them. Goodall, who died on Wednesday, would go on to become one of the most popular scientists in the world.

A part of what made her endearing to ordinary people, though, infuriated her own scientific establishment. She named the chimps she was studying instead of maintaining an objective distance by numbering them, thus humanizing them, a perilous thing to do in the study of animal behaviour.

She defended her method through more sacrilege, saying that individual chimps had personalities, and t...