Jane Goodall

Dame Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall, known as Jane Goodall, was an English primatologist and anthropologist. Many people called her "the world's preeminent chimpanzee expert." She died on 1 October 2025, at the age of 91.

She was best known for more than sixty years of field research on the family and social lives of wild chimpanzees. She studied the Kasakela chimpanzee community at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. In 1960, she began working with the palaeontologist Louis Leakey. Her research showed that chimpanzees share many important traits with humans. These include using tools, having deep feelings, forming lasting social bonds, fighting organised battles with other groups, and passing knowledge from one generation to the next. This changed the old idea that humans are very different from other animals.

Goodall earned a PhD in ethology from the University of Cambridge in 1965. In 1971 she published her first full-length book about her studies, In the Shadow of Man. It was later translated into 48 languages. In 1977 she founded the Jane Goodall Institute to help protect wildlife. In 1991 she started the Roots & Shoots youth programme, which grew into a worldwide network. She also set up wildlife sanctuaries and reforestation projects in Africa. She spoke up for the ethical treatment of animals in animal testing, animal husbandry and captivity.

Over her career, Goodall wrote 32 books, 15 of them for children. She kept giving talks and travelled widely to promote conservation and climate action. In 2002 she was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace. In 2003 she became a dame commander of the Order of the British Empire, an honour given to her by Queen Elizabeth II. She also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from the United States, along with other honours. From 2022 until her death, she served on the board of the Nonhuman Rights Project.

There is also an Australian author with a similar name, Jane R. Goodall.

Early life and education

Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall was born in April 1934 in Hampstead, London. Her father, Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall, was a businessman. Her mother, Margaret Myfanwe Joseph, was a novelist from Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, who wrote under the pen name Vanne Morris-Goodall. The family moved to Bournemouth, where Goodall went to Uplands School, a private school in nearby Poole.

As a child, Goodall received a stuffed toy chimpanzee named Jubilee from her father, instead of a teddy bear. She said this toy started her love of animals. Jubilee was still on her dresser in London in 2000. Goodall loved animals and dreamed of Africa. In 1957, she went to a friend's farm in the White Highlands of the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya. She worked there as a secretary. She also called Louis Leakey, a Kenyan archaeologist and palaeontologist, to ask for a meeting about animals. Leakey thought that studying great apes could help people understand how early hominids behaved. He was looking for a researcher to study chimpanzees. He did not tell her this at first. Instead, he offered her a job as a secretary. After his wife and research partner, the palaeoanthropologist Mary Leakey, agreed, he sent Goodall to Olduvai Gorge in Tanganyika, which is now part of Tanzania. There, he shared his plans with her.

In 1958, Leakey sent Goodall to London to study primate behaviour with Osman Hill and primate body structure with John Napier. On 14 July 1960, she went to Gombe Stream National Park. She was the first of the women later called the Trimates. Her mother went with her, because the chief warden, David Anstey, was worried about their safety. Goodall says her mother encouraged her to become a scientist in primatology, a field that was mostly run by men at that time.

In 1962, Leakey helped arrange money for her to study at the University of Cambridge, even though she did not have a degree. She was the eighth person allowed to work toward a PhD there without a bachelor's degree. She studied ethology at Newnham College, Cambridge. Her thesis was supervised by Robert Hinde, and she finished it in 1966. In 2006, the Open University of Tanzania gave her an honorary Doctor of Science degree. In 2019, she became an honorary fellow of Newnham College and Darwin College, Cambridge. She also received an honorary doctorate that year.

Career

In 1960, Goodall began studying the social and family lives of chimpanzees in the Kasakela chimpanzee community in Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania. She found that chimpanzees have personalities, thoughts, and feelings, such as joy and sorrow. She also saw them hug, kiss, pat each other on the back, and tickle. Her research challenged two old beliefs: that only humans could make and use tools, and that chimpanzees were vegetarians. She watched chimpanzees "fish" for termites with grass stalks. She also saw them strip leaves from twigs to make them more useful. She found that chimpanzees could be aggressive, and that they sometimes hunt smaller monkeys, such as colobus monkeys. She described the Gombe Chimpanzee War from 1974 to 1978 in her 1990 book, Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe. Unlike other researchers, she gave the animals names instead of numbers. This helped her become the only human ever accepted into chimpanzee society. Some of the chimpanzees she named were David Greybeard, Goliath, Flo, and Frodo.

In 1977, Goodall founded the Jane Goodall Institute. It supports her research at Gombe and works to protect chimpanzees and their homes. Its youth programme, Roots & Shoots, began in 1991, when 12 local teenagers met with Goodall in Dar es Salaam. In 1992, she founded the Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Centre in the Republic of Congo to care for orphaned chimpanzees. Goodall was a vegetarian, and she became a vegan in 2021. She spoke up for animals and the environment. In 2000, she helped start Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Her work at Gombe has also been criticised. Some researchers believe that feeding chimpanzees at feeding stations changed their behaviour and may have increased the conflict Goodall saw. Goodall agreed that feeding had some effect, but she said it did not change the basic nature of chimpanzee conflict. In a 2017 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, she said she would not use feeding stations today.

Death

Goodall died in her sleep from cardiac arrest while staying at a friend's home in Beverly Hills, California, on 1 October 2025, at the age of 91. She had been on a speaking tour in the United States. Her death came 45 years to the day after her husband Bryceson's.

After she died, many famous people shared kind words about her. These included Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex; the former US vice president Al Gore; the former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau; the comedian Ellen DeGeneres; the actor Leonardo DiCaprio; and António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations. In October 2025, Netflix released the first episode of Famous Last Words, in which Goodall was interviewed by Brad Falchuk.

Legacy

Further information: List of awards and honours received by Jane Goodall

Goodall received many honours for her work to protect the environment and help people, and for other things. In the 1995 New Year Honours, she was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) "for services to zoology". In the 2003 Birthday Honours, she was promoted to Dame Commander of the same Order (DBE) "for services to the environment and conservation". The ceremony for her damehood was held at Buckingham Palace in 2004. In April 2002, Secretary-General Kofi Annan named Goodall a United Nations Messenger of Peace. Her other honours included the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, the French Legion of Honour, the Order of the Torch of Kilimanjaro of Tanzania, Japan's Kyoto Prize, the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science, the Gandhi-King Award for Nonviolence, and the Spanish Prince of Asturias Awards.

Many local governments, schools, groups and charities around the world also paid tribute to her. The Walt Disney Company gave her a plaque on the Tree of Life at the Disney's Animal Kingdom theme park. It also made a carving of David Greybeard, the first chimpanzee that came close to her during her first year at Gombe. She was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. In 2010, Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds held a concert at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., to celebrate "Gombe 50: a global celebration of Jane Goodall's pioneering chimpanzee research and inspiring vision for our future". Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2019. In 2021, she received the Templeton Prize. On 31 December 2021, she guest edited the BBC Radio Four programme Today and chose Francis Collins to present Thought for the Day. In 2022, she received the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication for her long-term study of the social and family lives of wild chimpanzees. In April 2023, she was made an Officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau at a ceremony in The Hague, the Netherlands. In October 2024, she gave "A Speech for History" at UNESCO. In January 2025, US President Joe Biden gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In December 2025, PETA gave her its "Person of the Year" award after her death, to honour her "legacy of kindness."

Personal life

Goodall was married twice. On 28 March 1964 she married Baron Hugo van Lawick, a Dutch nobleman and wildlife photographer, at Chelsea Old Church in London. During the marriage, she was known as Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall. The couple had a son, Hugo, whose nickname was "Grub." He was born in 1967. They divorced in 1974. The next year, she married Derek Bryceson. He had been a member of Tanzania's parliament and was the director of the country's national parks. Bryceson died in October 1980. Because of his important job in the Tanzanian government, he was able to protect Goodall's research project. He also set up a ban on tourism at Gombe. Goodall said that her favourite animal was the dog, not the chimpanzees she studied. She had prosopagnosia, a condition that made it hard to recognise familiar faces. She lived in Bournemouth, England.

Goodall supported the idea that undiscovered primates might still exist. These include cryptids such as Sasquatch, Yeren, and other types of Bigfoot. In 2012, she said she was fascinated by the idea and would love for them to exist. She was raised in a Christian congregationalist family. As a young woman, she took night classes in Theosophy. In 1977, she had a mystical experience at Notre Dame Cathedral, which led her to believe in a guiding power in the universe. She said she saw no contradiction between evolution and belief in God. In 2017, she wrote the foreword to a book by Ervin Laszlo, a philosopher of science who supports the quantum consciousness theory.

In popular culture

Stevie Nicks's song "Jane", written in 1990, celebrates Goodall's life and work. It is the last song on Nicks's 1994 album Street Angel.

On 3 March 2022, for Women's History Month and International Women's Day, the Lego Group released set number 40530, A Jane Goodall Tribute. It has a Goodall minifigure and three chimpanzees in an African forest. In 2022, Mattel released a Barbie-themed Goodall doll made from recycled plastic. She wears field clothes and carries binoculars and a notebook. Mattel said the doll honours Goodall's "decades of dedication, ground-breaking research, and heroic achievements as a conservationist, animal behavior expert, and activist".

In 1987, Gary Larson drew a Far Side cartoon showing two chimpanzees grooming each other. The Jane Goodall Institute called the cartoon an "atrocity" in a letter. Later, Goodall found it funny, and she named it her favourite picture of herself in pop culture. Larson gave the institute the profits from a shirt with the cartoon on it.

The Simpsons made fun of Goodall in the 2001 episode "Simpson Safari". She voiced herself in the 2019 episode "Gorillas on the Mast". She also voiced herself in an episode of The Wild Thornberrys, "The Trouble with Darwin".

In February 2021, Apple TV+ ordered Jane, a children's educational show created by J. J. Johnson. It was made with Sinking Ship Entertainment and the Jane Goodall Institute. Goodall appeared as herself in the final episode, which aired on 18 April 2025. In October 2025, after Goodall's death, it was announced that the filmmaker Richard Ladkani was making a documentary about her life.

Works

Jane Goodall wrote many books for adults and for children. One early book, My Friends the Wild Chimpanzees, was published in 1969 by the National Geographic Society. Her book In the Shadow of Man was published by Houghton Mifflin. It was translated into 48 languages. Later books included Through a Window in 1990 and Reason for Hope in 1999.

Goodall also wrote books for young readers, such as The Chimpanzee Family Book and Chimpanzees I Love. The second one was published by Scholastic Press. More than 40 films have been made about her. One of them is a 2000 PBS special called Jane Goodall: Reason for Hope.