The ascent of one woman

Esther Addley meets Jane Goodall, the secretary from Bournemouth who became the world's most famous primatologist

In the course of a five-decade career, in which she has become the confidante of presidents and pop stars, shaken the hands, she reckons, of several million people, raised vast funds for conservation projects, inspired, in effect, the birth of a new branch of science, and radically redefined our understanding of what makes humans distinct from animals, there is one incident which, for Jane Goodall, stands out as the most significant of her life.

"It was one day that I was tracking through the jungle, following David Greybeard, who was always my favourite, at a distance. At one point I thought I'd lost him, and then, suddenly, I entered a clearing, and he was sitting there, looking at me, as if he had been waiting for me. And who knows, perhaps he was?" She is still delighted by the memory, "I wasn't quite sure what to do, but after a little while I approached him, very gingerly, and I noticed there was a pinenut on the ground - they love those. So I picked it up, and very slowly, very gently, held it out to him. He pushed my hand away, but he didn't run away. So I tried again, and he took the pinenut from me, and threw it on the ground. But then he did the most remarkable thing. He reached out his hand" - she slowly extends her own - "and covered mine with it, and just held it for a moment." Her touch on my wrist is cool, and feather light. "It's what chimpanzees do to reassure each other. And it was just remarkable, this wild animal communicating with me just as he would with a member of his own species. I don't know if there was some ancient brotherhood between us that he was tapping into. But I found it absolutely incredible." At that moment, she says, she knew that the evolutionary gap between humans and chimpanzees was not, after all, so very wide.

Goodall was 26 when she first started work with chimpanzees. A former secretary from Bournemouth, she had had a lifetime obsession with animals, but had no academic training, in science or anything else. She had arrived in Africa three years earlier, in 1957, having saved up waitressing tips to pay for the long boat journey south, and, through a mix of chance and persistence, got herself a job as secretary to the celebrated anthropologist Louis Leakey.

Leakey was already well known as a result of the extraordinary hominid fossil finds he was uncovering at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. Within a few months Goodall had convinced him that she was the person to undertake a study of a group of chimpanzees that he had identified living in an area of virgin forest called Gombe on the shores of Lake Tanganyika.

Leakey had a hunch that a study of the social lives of the chimps would help him understand better the early hominids he was discovering at Olduvai, and their modern human descendants. But neither he nor, certainly, Goodall had the smallest inkling of the shattering effect her observations would have on the cosy assumptions of behavioural science.

"Oh no," she laughs. "I didn't know the first thing about studying chimps so I had no idea what I would find. They had never been studied in the wild before. All I remember thinking was that I had to find out enough about the chimps to satisfy my own curiosity, and so as not to let Louis Leakey down. And, you know, I knew nothing about science. I wasn't interested in being a scientist. I wanted to learn about chimpanzees and write books about them, that was all."

In fact, her most celebrated finding, the one that would prompt Stephen Jay Gould to call her work "one of the western world's great scientific achievements", came quite by accident, and within months of her arrival at Gombe. One rainy morning Goodall witnessed, through her binoculars, the chimp she called David Greybeard pushing a long leafy stem into a hole in a termite mound, withdrawing it, and sucking from it the soldier termites that had defensively clung to the prod. He was, Goodall realised, fishing for his food.

What is more, as she observed the phenomenon repeatedly, Goodall noticed that the chimps would fashion the rods themselves, by plucking twigs off trees and pulling off the outer leaves. The ability to make tools, until then accepted as the chasm that separated humans from the animal kingdom, was not, after all, exclusive to homo sapiens. In a breathless telegram, Leakey enthused: "We must now redefine man, redefine tools, or accept chimpanzees as humans."

Today is Jane Goodall's 69th birthday, and she is arguably, pace Stephen Hawking, the most famous scientist alive - at least outside her native country. It is 43 years since she first established her research station - a project which continues - making the chimps of Gombe the best known and longest studied community of wild animals in the world. But if she is already long past the age when most of her peers would be considering a genteel retirement, either basking in her gargantuan academic reputation or living quietly with her beloved chimps, the pace of Goodall's life has, if anything, accelerated vastly as she got older. Having spent almost 30 years in solitary, silent observation, crouched behind bushes in the African jungle, Goodall now travels for 300 days a year, campaigning tirelessly on conservation issues. Since 1986 she has not spent more than three weeks in one place.

We first meet in London, when Goodall's assistant Mary Lewis, one of the clutch of ferociously competent middle-aged women who steer her through her relentless itinerary, mentions that Goodall might have a free hour or two while passing through the capital. In fact we manage a conversation of 15 minutes, squeezed between a book launch and a snatched, rare afternoon spent with her sister and niece. "I don't think you quite realise how busy she is," says Lewis with no little understatement. Some weeks later she gets in touch to say Dr Goodall will have some time in mid-March while visiting Denver, Colorado, if I can make it there.

Goodall is in town principally to open "The remarkable world of Jane Goodall," a travelling exhibit - including mock up jungle - being housed for three months by the Denver museum of nature and science, and "Jane Goodall's Wild Chimpanzees," an Imax movie about Gombe that the museum will also be screening until the end of the year. And Denver, it is fair to say, is pretty excited about its guest. "She's like a rock star in America," Lewis had warned, but the reaction that this shy, grey-haired Englishwoman excites still comes as a shock. We are smuggled into buildings via back doors and underground service lifts, while excited fans push forward for an autograph or a picture. In every Starbucks shop in which we stop (of which there are many - Goodall seems to survive on little more than black coffee and crumbleberry slices), the young women servers take us aside and ask: "Is that who I think it is?" At a book signing in the nearby city of Boulder, a number of the several hundred people queueing for an autograph are in tears by the time they reach Goodall's table. "I had four people tell me today that they had done science to PhD level because of me," an exhausted Goodall notes with quiet triumph when the queue has finally been whipped past her.

Be in no doubt, Jane Goodall is very famous indeed. She appears on prime time chatshows in America, and gets name-checked on the Simpsons. Kofi Annan is a friend, Michael Douglas, Whoopi Goldberg and Alicia Silverstone rank among a ticker-tape list of celebrity supporters. Michael Jackson wrote a song for her after he requested she visit his Neverland ranch to advise him on the care of his own pet chimp Bubbles. ("Michael asked me for some tapes that we had about the suffering of chimps in captivity, so that he would be able to get very upset to help him write the song," says Goodall - "Heal the world" went on to be an enormous hit worldwide.) She is almost certainly the only prominent scientist who needs occasionally to wear dark glasses and a wig to disguise herself from enthusiastic fans.

For this remarkable level of celebrity, Goodall largely has the National Geographic Society to thank. Encouraged by her observation of toolmaking, the organisation was persuaded to provide funding for a further year's research; some time later it sent a young photographer, Hugo van Lawick. Goodall's work with the chimps was in its infancy and she was still "habituating" the chimps to her presence when he arrived; his photographs of wild chimpanzees looking under her shirt for hidden bananas, and early films of baby apes reaching out to touch her nose, were flashed around the world. The beautiful white Englishwoman, with the strangely spiritual connection with nature, very quickly became a star. In 1964 Van Lawick and Goodall married; a son, Hugo (known as Grub) followed three years later.

But if the public reacted enthusiastically to her work, the reaction from the scientific community, which her observations so challenged, could scarcely have been more different. In 1962, encouraged by Leakey, she left Gombe to write up her findings for a PhD at Cambridge. "He knew that I would never be taken seriously without some form of academic training," she says, "and we didn't have time to do a BA." But the greeting she met there, she says, was "hostility. Pure hostility. A rather supercilious, superior attitude. Just shrugging me off: the Geographic cover girl, that's all you are." Not knowing any better at the time, Goodall had begun by feeding the chimps, to win their trust. She had also, while making no effort to tame them, given them names, mainly to help her identify them; accepted wisdom demanded that she should have numbered them, like other scientific subjects. Most damningly, her attribution of personalities and emotions - grief, despair, empathy - to the individual animals was seen as naive and shockingly anthropomorphic. When her PhD thesis was returned to her after a first reading, the genders of the chimps had been crossed out, in every case replacing "he" or "she" with "it". Furious, Goodall wrote her pronouns back in. The thesis stayed as she wanted it.

Her studies would go on to show that chimpanzees demonstrate a range of behaviours previously thought unique to humans: reasoned thought, abstraction, generalisation, symbolic representation, and concept of self. But not all her findings were benign. Goodall admits she was "devastated" to observe that the chimpanzees, widely romanticised as prelapsarian noble savages, were every bit as capable of brutality as their hominid cousins. It was known that the apes occasionally ate meat, but Goodall was the first to observe male chimps in highly organised, savage hunts of smaller mammals for food. She watched two female chimps embark on a murderous, and cannibalistic, campaign against other females' young. At one point the Gombe chimps became embroiled in what Goodall calls "the four-year war", in which one group of chimps set about systematically annihilating a smaller group that had become isolated from it. Such levels of sophisticated, and brutal, behaviour had never been observed in non-human primates, and they sparked furious controversy.

"It wasn't until I went to a Unesco conference on aggression that I realised the politics of science," she says. "My observations suggested that in chimps, certainly, violence was innate, so I assumed it was probably innate in us. But I was criticised for even publishing those findings; some scientists said to me, 'If you publish this information, people will take for granted that we have inherited aggression from our ancient primate ancestors, and war is inevitable.' It was my first experience of how vicious that can be."

So is human warfare a biologically predetermined inevitability? "Clearly I do believe we have inherited aggressive tendencies - you can't look around the world and say that we don't have some kind of innate response to certain actions which is an aggressive response. But at the same time, chimpanzees show love, compassion and altruism; we have inherited those things too. And, with our huge brains, we have far more ability to control our genetic inheritance than any other creature. War is not inevitable. Human aggression can be controlled." She is appalled, vocally so, by the current conflict in Iraq.

(A lifetime of facing down controversy, however, means Goodall has no fear of thinking outside accepted scientific parameters: a recent comment to a radio interviewer that she was prepared to accept the possible existence of Bigfoot and other unknown great apes prompted a flood of correspondence, to her great delight. "It seems unlikely, doesn't it, but, I don't know, there's something there.")

If the National Geographic films made Goodall a star; they also sparked a small stampede of scientists and amateurs wanting, effectively, to be her. Two women in particular, Dian Fossey and Birute Galdikas, contacted Leakey begging for similar jobs; he assigned them to projects observing, respectively, gorillas in Rwanda and orangutans in Borneo. (The three came to be known, in science circles, as Leakey's "trimates".) Primate studies are now well established around the world; inspired, in part, by the three women, primatology is one of the few branches of science in which women predominate (62% of members of the world directory of primatologists are female, 90% of sanctuaries around the world are run by women). It may also be, suggests Goodall, that women are simply better at this kind of science. "Women traditionally have had to notice little signals between males, to keep the peace. And most importantly, they have to understand the wants of a non-verbal being."

In 1986, overnight, Jane Goodall ceased to be a field scientist. She was attending a conference, marking the publication of her major behavioural study "The Chimpanzees of Gombe", at which primatologists working across the globe got to their feet, one by one, and described the critical threats - from habitat destruction to the bushmeat trade - to their respective communities. "I realised, right there, that I had to leave being an observer, and I had to go and do something. I had absolutely no choice. It was really weird, because I went to that conference fully planning to write volume two of that study, and I came away knowing I never would."

The present scale of the Jane Goodall Institute, the conservation charity she founded in 1977, is testament to how seriously she has taken that commitment. Its head office, based in Maryland, has 33 full-time staff; there are a further 13 offices around the world. The organisation, with revenues of $4m a year and growing, supports a bewildering range of projects ranging from campaigns against the bush trade and the use of captive chimps in scientific research to innovative sustainable development projects for villagers living alongside ape communities; it also runs a number of sanctuaries in west Africa for chimpanzees rescued from hunters. Roots and Shoots, the education project developed by Goodall in 1991 for 16 Tanzanian teenagers, now has 5,000 groups in 70 countries; China's environment minister recently asked her to extend the programme throughout the country's school network.

Goodall is very big on positivity, and unrelenting on the theme of "hope", but the truth, as she knows, is that the future for the chimps at Gombe is perilous. While the 77.6 sq km (30 sq mile) park is protected, deforestation immediately outside its boundaries has been devastating.

Gombe's chimpanzee community now numbers only 150 or so individuals, leaving the long-term genetic sustainability of the group in serious doubt. Across Africa, the chimp population has fallen in a century from 2m to 150,000. "Unless we can enlarge existing habitat corridors linking the park to communities in the north," she writes in this month's National Geographic magazine, "the Gombe chimpanzees could succumb to disease or inbreeding within decades."

"That's why I will carry on with this ridiculous schedule for as long as I am able," she notes, wearily.

And so, after Denver it is San Francisco for a night, then Los Angeles, then Minnesota. "We have to stop leaving all the decisions to the so-called decision makers, but take matters into our own hands, realise that each one of us makes a difference, and that if everyone who cares acts in a way that is ethical, thinks about buying ethical things ..." she pauses for breath, with a self-conscious smile, "... then the world would be changed very fast."

Further reading

In the Shadow of Man by Jane Goodall. Phoenix Mass Market (1999). ISBN: 0753809478

The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behaviour by Jane Goodall. Harvard University Press (1990). ISBN: 0674116496

Beauty and the Beasts: Woman, Ape and Evolution by Carol Jahme.Virago (2000). ISBN: 1860494757

More information about Jane Goodall at the Jane Goodall Institute