Investor's Business Daily, June 6th, 2007
Jane Goodall discovered that sometimes knowing less is more.
When Louis Leakey sent her to the Gombe Stream chimpanzee preserve in 1960 in what is now Tanzania, Goodall was only a secretarial school graduate. That turned out to be one of the pluses.
Leakey felt women were better observers and more patient than men, and were likely to do a better job of getting animals used to them.
Also, Goodall told IBD that Leakey believed "someone who hadn't been to university and whose mind wasn't biased could do better. He was right, very right."
Because she didn't know the rules, she didn't automatically dismiss chimp behavior real scientists might have considered aberrations. Starting from ground zero, she wrote down and analyzed everything she observed:
Chimps used tools, they had personalities and they were warlike, traits previously believed exclusive to humans.
Beyond those observations, she gave the chimps names. "I named them when I should have given them numbers," she said. "I wasn't supposed to do it, but I didn't know it."
Her findings were so impressive that when he first heard of them Leakey sent Goodall a telegram that said:
"Now we must redefine tool, redefine man or accept chimpanzees as human."
Close To Animals
Going to Africa was almost Goodall's destiny. She grew up in the British countryside surrounded by animals. She was curious and patient. As her biographer Dale Peterson wrote in "Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man," Jane was about 5 years old when she disappeared. The family looked all around for her and eventually called the police.
Later that evening she reappeared, her hair and clothing covered in straw. She'd been lying quietly in the hen house for five hours.
"I had to find out how hens lay eggs, so I went into a hen coop to find out," she said. "But as soon as I went in, the hens went out. So I went into an empty coop and sat in a corner and waited until a hen came in who didn't mind me in there."
Goodall also wasn't afraid of hard and dirty work. Her family was poor, so she couldn't afford pony rides with her wealthier classmates.
What to do? She worked out an arrangement with the local stable owner. She would, Peterson wrote, "groom the ponies and horses, feed them, and clean the stables and tack, washing the saddles and bridles with saddle soap and running them down. She shoveled manure and pulled up weeds, and helped ... in the potato fields."
As important, her mother encouraged her to believe she could do anything she set her mind to. As a child, Goodall said she spent her time "dreaming about Africa. When I was 11, I fell in love with Tarzan."
One summer her mother saved money to take Jane to a Tarzan movie. But when she got there, Goodall said, "I burst into tears. She had to take me out (of the cinema). My mother asked, 'What's the matter?' I told her, 'That's not Tarzan. That's Johnny Weissmuller.'"
Rather than be alarmed, her mother encouraged her dreaming.
"They all thought I was crazy," Goodall said. "All through my childhood people told me you'll never get to Africa. You can't go off into the bush. They all thought of Africa as the Dark Continent, with the natives using poison arrows. But my mother used to tell me if you really want to go, you can."
In 1957, Goodall visited a school chum's family farm in Kenya for an extended vacation. There she met Leakey, who had been searching for someone to study the chimps. She served for a while as his secretary and clearly impressed him.
It took a while for the authorities to let her take up residency. The Tanzanian government had no experience with a woman who wanted to perform scientific research. It refused to let Goodall take up residence in the jungle alone, so her mother accompanied her.
Goodall arrived at Gombe Stream in the summer of 1960. Understandably, at first the chimps ran whenever they spotted her, but soon they got used to her. She made it a point 15 work at their comfort level, approaching slowly but openly.
"When the apes were clearly distracted or distressed at being looked at, she would do her best to pretend she was not really interested in looking to begin with," Peterson wrote.
Goodall would go into what she calls her baboon act, pretending to dig for and eat insects and grubs or scratching herself.
Ultimately she got to know the chimps as individuals -- another no-no among scientists. That let her see them fashioning and using tools to get termites out of their nests; annihilating other chimps, the first time researchers saw that in nonhuman primates; and hunting for and eating meat.
Her early research was sponsored primarily by the National Geographic Society. She supplemented that funding by giving lectures worldwide for a fee -- then turned over money to help fund research she was doing at the Gombe preserve.
She was a popular speaker who frequently punctuated her speeches with animal sounds.
Her talks were often anecdotal: "Let me tell you a story, because sometimes stories are the best way to understand things."
Goodall had to put up with regional political instability. While forging relationships with American schools, she made it a point 15 Africanize her research. As the public became familiar with her work and the chimps, she promoted local people who'd signed on as menial labor to positions of responsibility.
She also forged a relationship with the University of Dar es Salaam, accepting its students on the same basis as she accepted Americans.
Her management style tended to be more democratic than demanding. As Peterson wrote, she preferred to persuade rather than demand -- she always listened and was encouraging.
Accruing all her expertise wasn't enough. The scientific community ignored her findings because she lacked traditional credentials. So Leakey arranged for her to attend the University of Cambridge in England as a doctoral student -- though she had no undergraduate degree.
Landing A Degree
She worked at it from 1961 to 1966, when she landed a degree after commuting between Africa and England and North America. She also managed to supervise the goings-on at Gombe and write articles and books about her experiences.
Now Goodall, 73, spends time on the road when she's not in England or Tanzania. Part of what keeps her going, she says, is her belief in the power of one to affect change.
It's part of the reason she founded Roots and Shoots, an organization that does everything from cleaning up litter to raising funds for natural-disaster victims.
"We suffer from just-me-ism," she said. "I'm just one person. I live in a world of 6 billion. So how can I make a difference? The thing that's extraordinary is how quickly things can change when individuals get involved."
