When the world received news of 91-year-old Jane Goodall’s passing, we were all saddened.
I can’t speak for everybody, but where I grew up, Jane Goodall was a household name. She was one of my earliest childhood heroes, and for good reason. Jane was a pioneer in her field. When she began her work under paleontologist Louis Leakey, she had no formal scientific training. To be a woman in science in the 1960s was to be a trailblazer, but Goodall pushed these boundaries even farther with her research.
Her work specialized in the study and observation of chimpanzees in Eastern Africa — a field that was previously approached in an objective, impersonal manner. Goodall took an unorthodox approach to her research that immediately gained criticism from the scientific community. Essentially, she separated herself from the scientific observational norms and studied the chimpanzee community through direct immersion — as a neighbor rather than a spectator.
In an interview between Goodall and Terry Gross published through NPR, we get a glimpse into exactly what made her work so revolutionary.
Until Goodall stepped foot into the Tanzanian jungle, there had never been a documented witness of an animal using a tool. At the time, it was thought only humans were intelligent enough to do so. But in 1960, she witnessed a large male chimpanzee she’d named David Greybeard procuring termites from a mound with a large stick. That singular observation took the scientific community by storm, and for no small reason.
While today we know the human race shares roughly 98% of its DNA with chimps, at the time, all animals were widely regarded as inferior creatures. Through relentless taunting and criticism from her peers, these quiet observations challenged the rigidity of scientific thinking.
David Greybeared wasn’t the only one of her subjects with a name. Dr. Goodall referred to all the chimpanzees she studied by name instead of number.
In papers she published, Dr. Goodall discussed her subjects in terms of he and she instead of the objective “it.” Small measures like these received pushback from her colleagues, yet Goodall’s persistence led to — in my opinion — some of the greatest discoveries of our generation. These takeaways were not numerical, but rather general understandings of the world and our place in it.Â
As Goodall began to see herself — and by correlation the human race — arm in arm with chimpanzees, conservation became the focus of her work. Habitat destruction, trafficking, and human-driven climate change are daunting threats to not just chimpanzees, but our entire natural world. A quote by the Jane Goodall Institute, which she founded in 1977, perfectly encapsulates the humanity of the entire study. Goodall “went into the forest to study the remarkable lives of chimpanzees — and she came out of the forest to save them.”
Who could have possibly known that a scientist with such humble beginnings would go on to redefine the collaboration between compassion and science? Goodall relied on traits most scientists viewed as weaknesses. She taught the world to view hope not as naive, but as the first stepping stone to positive change. She was one of humanity’s kindest, clearest voices, so in many ways, her absence feels like the end of an era.Â
But perhaps her death is also a bit of a wake-up call. In 2025, we are all on the forefront of the battle to protect and restore our natural world. As Jane Goodall taught me to believe, hope is not an emotion, but an action.
Jane Goodall may be gone, but her legacy lives on. and now it’s our turn to act.
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