Jane Goodall

Jane Goodall, a primatologist who brought the world a new understanding of the chimpanzee – and prompted us to reexamine the dominance of humans in the process – died recently at the age of 91 while traveling in California on a speaking tour.

Goodall was one of the best-known scientists of modern times, profoundly influencing our ideas of how to conduct field research. Yet her methods were unorthodox for her time, and when she began her groundbreaking work, she had no scientific training. She didn't even have a college degree. That lack of training – and the bias that comes with training – was what gave Goodall the fresh perspective that allowed her to see things other scientists had overlooked.

Whereas the typical mid-century scientist would observe their subject passively from afar, taking great pains to avoid being seen and absolutely never interacting with the subject, Goodall dove into the community of chimps she observed. She gave them cute names instead of numbers, as was the custom of other researchers. She offered them her friendship and encouraged them to come to her for food – she even lived among them for a time. It was incredibly sloppy work in the eyes of the scientific community. It was also what allowed Goodall to see the chimps behaving in ways no one before had ever observed or even imagined.

Goodall was a young woman of 22 when she first went to Africa, the continent she would make her home. A secretary at Oxford University, she received an invitation from a friend to visit in Kenya. Having grown up as an avid animal lover who dreamed of traveling in Africa, Goodall jumped at the chance, saving money until she could afford passage to Kenya via ship. It was originally intended to be a pleasure trip, but a fateful meeting changed the tone of the trip – and Goodall's life.

It was renowned anthropologist Louis Leakey who made that change. Curator of the Coryndon Museum in Nairobi, Kenya, he was introduced to Goodall via a mutual friend. Leakey offered Goodall a job at the museum, and as he worked with her, he saw in her a quality he knew was essential in a field researcher. It was nothing particularly glamorous, but instead a vast reserve of patience for repetitive, even boring tasks.

Leakey was looking for someone to observe chimps in order to prove a hypothesis. He agreed with Charles Darwin that chimps and humans shared a common ancestor, and he thought a skilled field researcher might see in chimps clues that pointed to that ancestor. It was an anthropologist's mission he sent Goodall on, but as she worked, Goodall became an ethologist.

Not that she knew, at the time, what that meant. "I didn't even know what ethology was," she told National Geographic. "I had to wait quite a while before I realized it simply meant studying behavior." She would learn all about ethology when, after she proved her abilities in the field, Leakey sent her to Cambridge University to get a PhD in order to underpin her practical skills with scientific knowledge.

Before she even got the PhD, Goodall had already begun to revolutionize field biology. She arrived at the now-famous Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania in 1960. Her goal was to observe the chimpanzees as per Leakey's request, and she did that and much more. Without a scientific background, Goodall had no idea that she shouldn't seek out interactions with the chimps, so she went ahead and did it.

It was slow going in the early days. Goodall couldn't simply walk up to the chimps and ask to be included in their social group. In her early days at Gombe, she did simply observe. And within a few months, she had observed something extraordinary.

While walking around Gombe one day, Goodall saw a chimp climb onto a termite mound. As he spent some time at its top, Goodall realized he had a long blade of grass, which he was using to "fish" for termites inside the mound, which he would then extract and eat. This simple observation offered one small but significant proof: chimps, long thought to be strict vegetarians, weren't. And it completely blew away one long-held tenet. Tool use was thought to be exclusive to mankind, but here was a chimp using a tool.

In the years since Goodall's discovery, we've seen other animals use tools. Elephants use branches to swat flies; otters use rocks to open shellfish; octopi create shelters out of coconut shells. But Goodall was the first to identify tool use in an animal, and it was a mind-blowing discovery. When Leakey heard of it, he wrote, to her, "Now we must redefine 'tool,' redefine 'man,' or accept chimpanzees as humans."

But the scientific establishment wasn't as excited about Goodall's discoveries as Leakey was. That was in large part because, shortly after seeing that chimp display tool use, Goodall befriended him. More open and curious than some of the other chimps in his group, he discovered that if he visited Goodall's camp, he might find food. He came back again and again, sometimes bringing another chimp.

Goodall encouraged his visits, leaving bananas out for him and, eventually, enticing him to take food from her hand. Before long, the human and the chimp were fast friends, and she had named him David Greybeard. His influence convinced the other chimps of Gombe that Goodall was to be trusted. As she grew closer to the chimps, giving them names like Flo and Melissa, she began observing more and more entirely new things about their society. They had social lives, she discovered. They displayed emotion, had distinct personalities.

By the time Goodall got to Cambridge in 1962, she had gathered great amounts of data and drawn many conclusions via her close relationship with the chimps. But her unorthodox methodology prompted derision from her colleagues at Cambridge. So did her publication, in 1967, of her first book, the popular "My Friends the Wild Chimpanzees." One of the earliest popular science books, it made her a star among the public and an object of horror at Cambridge. Goodall told the New York Times that she was very nearly expelled after the book's publication, which prompted outrage from her mentor: "It's - it's - it's for the general public!"

Goodall persevered, receiving her PhD and returning to Africa, to Gombe, where she carried on observing the lives of the chimps that had become so familiar to her. Gombe grew, becoming a well-regarded research station that played host to students on internships, launching many careers. It also attracted local researchers from Tanzania, who worked alongside Goodall as she continued her decades-long study of the chimpanzee.

It was those locals who were able to carry on Gombe's work when Goodall made the decision to move on and discontinue her life as a researcher. It was a decision based not on any loss of love for the work she was doing, but on the desperate need for someone to advocate for the chimps as their habitat was crowded out by humans. Goodall observed a shocking change in Gombe while flying over it in a small plane in the early 1990s. Her little sliver of protected forest was shrinking on all sides as human habitation encroached on it. If the trend continued, soon there'd be no Gombe left, and no place for the chimps that called it home to go.

She had been alert to the loss of forest for some years, having noticed while attending a primatologists' conference in the 1980s that a common theme of discussion was deforestation. "Every single place where people were working, forests were disappearing," she told the New York Times. "It was an absolute shock."

Witnessing it in her own part of the world was enough to prompt her to take major action. Goodall changed her focus, stepping out of the forest and into public life as an advocate for conservation. It was a big change for someone who had gotten used to a quiet life among a group of chimps and only a handful of other people. Now, Goodall was traveling 300 days a year, spreading her gospel of conservation all over the world. It was a pace she would keep up for decades. Even in her 80s, she was traveling and educating with the same urgency and passion she had in middle age.

The beauty of Goodall's conservation work is that it benefitted not just the chimpanzee, but myriad other species as well – including humans. As she set up and advocated programs for humans to plant trees, to foster animal-friendly tourism, to clean up their environment, she also helped advance job opportunities and healthy environments for humans. Goodall's view was of the world as deeply interconnected, where one good engenders another.

Knowing that energy and passion for are especially high in the young, Goodall created Roots & Shoots, a global organization that brings together young people to create and implement conservation projects. She also created the Jane Goodall Institute, focused on protecting great apes, promoting sustainability, and bringing infrastructure and health initiatives to poor communities.

Goodall's lifelong dedication toward research and conservation earned her many accolades. She was named a United Nations Ambassador of Peace and a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She was awarded the French Legion d'honneur, honorary doctorates from multiple universities, and the Gandhi/King Award for Non-Violence. The list goes on, with organizations all over the world recognizing Goodall for her decades of work.

The tributes to Goodall weren't all quite so serious. In 1987, irreverent comic artist Gary Larson made Goodall a part of his popular "The Far Side" comic when he drew a pair of chimps, one grooming the other and scolding, "Well, well-another blonde hair … Conducting a little more 'research' with that Jane Goodall tramp?" The people at the Jane Goodall Institute were deeply offended, and they wrote a scolding letter to Larson's syndicate.

But Goodall herself, when she finally got a chance to see the cartoon, loved it. "I thought it was very funny," she told NPR. "And I think if you make a Gary Larson cartoon, boy you've made it." In a "no hard feelings" gesture, she invited Larson to visit Gombe, and she would go on to write the preface to one of his comic collections.

It was just one short piece of writing in a long writing career that went hand in hand with her research. Beginning with that first well-received (but horrifying to her colleagues) popular science book, Goodall wrote two dozen books for children and adults, including the New York Times Notable Book "Visions of Caliban." She also made a number of films, in which she introduced the chimps of Gombe to the world and spread the word about conservation.

Born April 3, 1934 in London, Goodall knew from an early age that she both loved animals and was very curious about them. In an interview with Jane Fonda in Interview magazine, she told a story of an early encounter: "When I was one and a half, my mother found I had got a whole lot of earthworms in bed with me, and I was watching them. She said, 'You look as though you wondered how they walk without legs.' I had this wonderful, supportive mother who didn't get mad because of all the earth mucking up my bed."

As the young Goodall continued to be drawn to the animals around her, it was her childhood dog, Rusty, that truly helped solidify her purpose. He was a smart dog, she told Mother Nature Network: "Rusty worked out problems. He worked out that if he was hot, he could trot down the road, down to the chine and have a little swim and come back. He even did pretend games. He was unlike any other dog I've ever had."

Watching that intelligence in an animal had a profound influence on her, one that would lead her to naturally understand and accept the intelligence and emotional life of the chimps, years later. "You cannot share your life in a meaningful way with any kind of animal with a reasonably well-developed brain and not realize that animals have personalities," she told National Geographic.

Later in life, Goodall reflected on her work in an interview with the Guardian: "When I look back over my life, it's almost as if there was a plan laid out for me – from the little girl who was so passionate about animals who longed to go to Africa and whose family couldn't afford to put her through college. Everyone laughed at my dreams. I was supposed to be a secretary in Bournemouth."


(Image: ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP via Getty Images)