What important question does the novel, The Ugly Little Boy, present to its readers?

The Ugly Little Boy presents us with one of the most profound questions of our age: what is human? This can never be an idle question in a world in which people sometimes kill other people because of fervently held beliefs that since our genes make us human a fertilized human egg is human. When The Ugly Little Boy was published in 1958, World War II was still a memory so indelibly vivid for many adults that it constituted the central experience of their lives. At the black heart of that experience of man's inhumanity to other men were the death camps of the Germans, where people who did not meet the Nazi definition of human were systematically brutalized and murdered, and the killing by Japanese forces of millions of Chinese, who were deemed a race inferior to the Japanese. It can be seen then that the question of where humanity begins was a sensitive, emotionally charged one at the time The Ugly Little Boy was written, and Asimov—as humanist and biochemist—may have been aware that the issue of what is human would not quickly disappear but only become more contentious and complex.