Her girlhood was also filled with reading about animals, and about Africa - the wild place where she dreamed of one day living and writing books. This first episode of fieldwork, she said, illustrates the curiosity, persistence, and patience the natural sciences require. As a girl, the budding naturalist crawled into a henhouse and hid for hours to observe a hen laying an egg. At 18 months, she brought a family of earthworms to bed with her. That kind of study came naturally to Dame Valerie Jane Goodall (named a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2004), who grew up with a precocious fascination for animals. Goodall’s corpus of articles and books, said Wrangham, “completely advanced the understanding of chimpanzees,” and to this day remains a model of “how to study culture in animals.” (For his going-away party, Goodall prepared a meal of live termites, which Wrangham had to fish out of a jar - chimpanzeelike - with a twig.) Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology and, in the early 1970s, a graduate student who worked with her at Gombe. The iconic biologist - now 72 and perhaps the most famous woman scientist in the world - was at Harvard Sunday (March 18) to accept the Roger Tory Peterson Memorial medal, awarded annually since 1997 to world-shaking conservationists by the Harvard Museum of Natural History. In her first year at what was then the Gombe Stream National Reserve in Tanzania, Goodall also observed that chimpanzees - thought to be vegetarians - supplemented their diet by eating bush pigs, rodents, and insects. Goodall, a onetime secretary who skipped past a bachelor’s degree to do a doctorate in ethnology at the University of Cambridge, famously discovered that chimpanzees make and use tools, thrive in socially complex families, and even engage in warfare. Whatever problem comes along, today I can solve it.As a girl in England, Jane Goodall had a toy chimpanzee named Jubilee - a harbinger of the primatologist she was to become and of the jubilant audiences that greet her at every turn in adulthood.īeginning in 1960, her groundbreaking studies of chimpanzees in the African wild led to a series of revelations that revolutionized the scientific understanding of these close human relatives. One of the things she frequently draws on is her grandmother's favourite verse from the Bible, "As thy days, so shall thy strength be." "I can't wave a magic wand, but I can spend all my effort in trying to get everybody to realise that if we get together, if each one of us does what we can to make a difference every day, we start moving away from the doom and gloom," she says. "That's when I consciously thought about the fact that this can't be by chance, there must truly and honestly be something behind the universe." Hope for the futureĭr Goodall is still pushing boundaries as a conservation leader and activist – and she's still cultivating an extraordinary capacity for curiosity, wonder and hope. "It all came together then … the amazing path through history of the couplings, of people meeting, marrying, having children, that eventually led to Bach, the brilliant mind that created that glorious music. "As I was looking at the sun coming through the window, suddenly the amazing organ started up with Bach's Toccata and Fugue in G minor. "The sun was just rising and shining through the glorious rose window," she says. Dr Goodall was in Paris's Notre Dame Cathedral one morning in the 1970s, when she experienced a moment of spiritual enlightenment.
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