How Does Jane Goodall Work?

Dr. Jane Goodall's 60-year career has changed our understanding of chimpanzees and humanity alike. Learn how she's still working to improve our world for all its creatures in today's episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/big-thinkers/jane-goodall-global-face-for-global-peace.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff
Lauren Vogelbaum Here. But despite how it may feel, sometimes
there are a lot of kind, curious and scientifically savvy
people out there in the world working for good Today,
we wanted to profile one of them, a doctor Jane Goodall,

(00:24):
whose persistence pushed her through red tape, discrimination, baseless critics,
and even the results of her own research, causing her
to totally reshape her goals. A key to Jane Goodall's
persistence seems to have a lot to do with knowing
what she liked from a very young age and then
just insisting on doing it. She was born in London

(00:47):
in nineteen thirty four. Her father gave her a stuffed
chimpanzee when she was a baby, and she took it
with her everywhere, even though it was by all accounts
terrifying looking. She grew up love to observe in catalog
animals and dreamed of one day living with African animals
and writing books about them for a living. Her mother,

(01:08):
who was a novelist herself, told Goodall that seemed like
a perfectly reasonable idea, even though it was the nineteen
forties and not at all what middle class English girls
were expected to do. After she finished school, Goodall couldn't
afford to go to college, so she worked odd jobs
in London for a few years until a friend invited

(01:28):
her to visit her family's farm in Kenya, at which
point Goodall put everything else on hold and waited tables
until she made enough money to pay for the price
of the boat fare to Africa. A while in Kenya,
her friend suggested that she contact the paleontologist Lewis Leaky,
the curator of what's now the National Museum of Kenya,

(01:49):
in order to discuss primates. Leaki was interested in studying
primate behavior in order to better understand early human species.
He wound up hiring Goodall as his field assistant on
a dig, and later asked her to return to England
to research primates and raise money for a long term
observational study on wild chimpanzees at the Gombe Stream National

(02:11):
Park in Tanzania. So in July nineteen sixty, twenty six
year old Jane began setting up her field station at Gambay,
which would become the site of the longest running wildlife
research project in history. British authorities initially bulked at the
idea of a young woman doing this kind of work
on chaperone, so Goodall's mother accompanied her for the first

(02:33):
few months. Goodall observed the chimpanzees daily for two years
before she earned their trust. Her method was to just
watch the animals and imitate their actions, recording everything that
happened in a field journal. Two of Goodall's most important
discoveries during this period had to do with what chimps
eight and how they went about getting food. The Goodall

(02:56):
was the first to observe chimpanzees killing and eating's small mammals.
Prior to this, they were thought to be vegetarian. She
also made the revolutionary observation that chimps collected and then
modified grass stems and sticks as tools to fish termites
out of their nests. It was the first time a
non human animal had been observed making and using tools,

(03:19):
and it prompted science to reconsider what it means to
be human in the first place. Goodall's discoveries were so
significant that Leaky arranged for her to write a dissertation
at Cambridge University on the behaviors of wild chimpanzees. It
was accepted and she became one of only eight people
ever to graduate from Cambridge with her PhD without first
earning an undergraduate degree. In nineteen sixty four, Goodall married

(03:44):
a Dutch wildlife photographer by the name of Hugo Van Lavic.
Their son, Hugo Eric Lewis, affectionately nicknamed Grubb, was born
in nineteen sixty seven and spent his early life with
his parents at Gombay. After Goodall and Lavik divorced in
nineteen seventy four, she married a member of Tanzania's parliament,
Derek Bryson, in nineteen seventy five. During this time, Goodall

(04:08):
published books about her experiences and research at Gambay, including
In the Shadow of Man, which was criticized by scientists
because of Goodell's practice of naming the subjects of her
research instead of referring to them by number, which was
and mostly still is the scientific norm. In an effort
to avoid anthropomorphizing one's animal subjects, she called her most

(04:30):
famous study subject David Graybeard, but the book was wildly
popular and has since been translated into at least forty
eight languages. As she lived and worked in Gombay, she
began to notice changes to the chimpanzee's habitat. Deforestation and
mining practices forced the animals out of their homes and
into smaller and smaller areas. More than a million wild

(04:54):
chimpanzees lived in Africa one hundred years ago, but today
only a fifth of that population exists. Goodall saw the
riding on the wall, which is why in the nineteen
eighties she changed her focus from observing chimps to working
to protect their habitat. She founded the Jane Goodall Institute
in nineteen seventy seven, which works to keep human communities

(05:17):
and wild chimpanzee populations in Africa both healthy and coexisting peacefully.
Another program of Hers Roots and Shoots helps empower young
people worldwide to make a difference in their local communities.
Having just turned ninety years old in twenty twenty four,
Goodall still spends about three hundred days a year traveling

(05:38):
and speaking about Africa, chimpanzees, the environment, reducing poverty, and
her other passions. In twenty nineteen, she was nominated for
the Nobel Peace Prize. Although Goodall sees with open eyes
the harm that we humans are doing to our planet,
she continues to be hopeful about our future, she told
The New York Times in seventeen quote, the lust for

(06:02):
greed and power has destroyed the beauty we inherited. But altruism, compassion,
and love have not been destroyed. All that is beautiful
in humanity has not been destroyed. The beauty of our
planet is not dead, but lying dormant, like the seeds
of a dead tree. We shall have another chance. Today's

(06:26):
episode is based on the article Jane Goodall, a Global
Face for Globalpeace on HowStuffWorks dot Com, written by Jesslynshields.
Brain Stuff is production by Heart Radio in partnership with
how Stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang.
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