Remembering Dame Jane Goodall

In the early mornings at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania, when the forest was still and Lake Tanganyika lay like glass, Jane Goodall waited. She waited for the animal world to reveal itself to her on its own terms, and in doing so, she changed our understanding of chimpanzee behaviours.

Dame Jane Goodall, ethologist, conservationist, and anthropologist, died on 1 October 2025, aged 91. She was best known for her research into the social and family life of the wild Kasekela chimpanzee community in Gombe.

Her adventure had started in July 1960, when her mentor, famed paleoanthropologist Dr Leakey, invited her to Tanzania, believing that her lack of formal academic training would enable her to study the animals with an open mind.

She began to watch an elderly chimpanzee, whom she named David Greybeard. His acceptance meant that other group members allowed Jane to observe. Through watching and waiting, she grew to know the individual members of the community and their habits. Within months, she witnessed chimpanzees stripping leaves from twigs to fish for termites, a landmark discovery that marked the first recorded use of tools by a non-human animal in the wild. This skill was previously used to distinguish humans from other primates. The old barrier between ‘us’ and ‘them’ could no longer hold.

Goodall continued working in Gombe with the same community of chimpanzees, documenting tenderness, play, hunting, and even lethal inter-group violence. In 1986, she attended a primatology conference that highlighted the widespread problem of deforestation and declining numbers of primates. Fearing for the communities she had grown to know so well, she transitioned from active research to a career as a conservationist and activist. She travelled the world giving talks advocating for animal welfare and environmental protection.

An inspiration to many female scientists, through over sixty years of groundbreaking work, she communicated the urgent need to protect chimpanzees from extinction and redefined species conservation to include the needs of local people and the environment. Founding both the Jane Goodall Institute and the youth programme Roots & Shoots, she used her first-hand experience to implore people to take action to reduce deforestation. 

By naming the animals she was working with, previously unheard of in ethology but since becoming common practice, Goodall humanized the apes. By describing their babies as playing like children, doing careful gymnastics on branches, she enabled people to see the similarities between themselves and them. She communicated the severity of deforestation and its continual detrimental impacts on chimpanzee communities, calling her audience to action.

She refused the false choice between research and responsibility. The same person who wrote field notes in the Tanzanian hills also sat with presidents, CEOs, and schoolchildren, asking each the same question: what will you do, now that you know?

Goodall’s legacy is not only a trove of observations from Gombe. She taught us lessons that we can apply to our own lives. She showed that a childhood passion can go beyond convention - you do not need to follow the standard route to contribute meaningfully to science. When the acclaim could have kept her in Tanzania, immersed in a world she loved, she chose the harder option: leaving the chimpanzees to share her passion around the world. She paid radical attention. She was patient with data and impatient with injustice. She treated curiosity as a discipline, as relevant in a lab as in a seminar on ethics or Chaucer.

Jane Goodall died sharing her knowledge about what she loved on a speaking tour in California. She strove for those who could not communicate their needs for themselves right until the end of her life, and inspired thousands of others in the process. 

“The least I can do is speak out for those who cannot speak for themselves.” 

 — Jane Goodall.

Illustration by Vera Kaganskaya