Jane Goodall: A Brief Biography

“Biology will relate every human gene to the genes of other animals and bacteria, to this great chain of being” – Walter Gilbert. Jane Goodall is a British biologist who, after rediscovering herself in Africa in her mid-20s, was chosen to start a project concerning chimpanzees, where she feel in love with the animals. The subsequent paragraphs focus on Goodalls’ early life, successful career, and later results and products of her research.
Before her groundbreaking studies with chimps, Jane Goodall was once a child like the rest of us.

Jane was born in London, England on April 3, 1934 to father, Mortimer, who was an engineer, and mother, Vanne, who was an author (“Jane Goodall”). She was raised in a big house on the ocean near Bournemouth, England- about 100 miles outside London- living with her parents, sister, and two aunts (“Jane Goodall”). Jane expressed her admiration for animals at a very young age, treasuring stuffed animals given to her as a toddler. Inspired by Doctor Dolittle books, written by Hugh Lofting, they just the beginning of Jane’s dreams of helping and protecting animals. When she was just four years old, her parents reported Jane missing, only to be discovered hours later in a nearby henhouse, where she was observing the hens, to see how they laid their eggs (“Jane Goodall Biography”). This could certainly be the origin of Goodall’s inspiration to become a biologist. In 1954, when Jane completed high school, she couldn’t afford to attend university. After a family friend invited her for a visit in Africa in 1957, however, that all changed; some of Jane’s work in Gombe with other scientist and chimpanzees became very popular and she was accepted to Cambridge University as a Ph.D. candidate (“Jane Goodall Biography”). She was one of an extremely short list of people at the time to get into the school without a university degree (“The Evolution of Jane Goodall”). Jane returned to England to attend on the advice of Louis Leaky, anthropologist and friend to Goodall, and earned a doctorate on ethology, which is the science of animal behavior (“Dame Jane

Goodall”).
Jane Goodall’s career speaks for itself; her research, compared to others in her field at the time, was unparalleled.

Her discoveries made a major contribution to the biological community, paving the way for others, and well as earned her many awards. Not much about chimpanzees was known, or studied, on the mid-1900s before Jane came along. At the time, these animals were mainly unbothered by curious humans. But the height of the space research program involving chimps went from the early 1950s to the early 1960s, right around the time Jane first ventured to Africa ("Air and Space | Research | Release & Restitution for Chimpanzees"). They were used to test gravity force as well as other conditions expected in space travel. Furthermore, Jane was not the only scientist to be studying the monkey family behaviorism, though she is certainly the most well known. An additional scientist at work around the same time was Francine Patterson. With permission form the San Francisco Zoo, she started to train a one-year-old gorilla American Sign Language. Patterson, still alive and well today, founded The Gorilla Foundation, a non-profit organization committed to the preservation of lowland gorillas (“Ape Women: 10 Dedicated Primate Researchers”). Similarly, Sally Boysen is also renowned for teaching chimps to read and write using English words and letters, as well as studying their cognitive development (“Chimps R Us”). Yet another scientist and conservationist, Birute Galdikas, was working with orangutans around 15years after Jane’s most prominent work with chimpanzees. Galdikas dedicated her life to the safety and wellbeing of the animals entrusted to her (“Birute

Galdikas”).
Throughout her impressive life as a biologist, Goodall has received numerous well-deserved honors and awards. These include the Metal of Tanzania, a country in Africa where she spend multiple years collecting data, The French Legion of Honors, The National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Metal, awarded distinction in discovery in research, and The Benjamin Franklin Metal in Life Science (“Dame Jane Goodall”). Additionally, a fun fact, Jane was given the title Dame of the British Empire -which is the equivalent to knighthood- by Queen Elizabeth II (“Dame Jane Goodall”).
With Jane still alive today, she is even now impacting the biological world, though the topic of chimpanzee research has changed since her research. In the 2000s, many countries such as Japan and the United Kingdom have limited/banned chimpanzee research, causing studies of the animals to cease in certain places (“International Bans”). As a result of more chimpanzee research being more experimentation than anything, most view the animals as needing protection. In contrast, Sara B. Hrdy has recently been studying human evolution by observing chimps; she has also written half a dozen books on a comparison between motherhood in humans compared to that of in primates. Even though Jane is not the prominent force she once was, she is still traveling today, acting as an activist on behalf of the animals she loves and dedicated her life to. Jane Goodall is now 81 years old living in her home country of England, working closely with the Jane Goodall Institution (JGI) as the founder.
As is overwhelmingly obvious, Goodall is such a vital part of chimpanzee research, and has been for many decades. She has come a long way since boarding her first plane to Africa, but her love for animals is as fierce as ever. From her early life to career to accomplishments beyond imagining, Jane Goodall is arguably the finest chimpanzee biologist, if there ever was one.