Jane Goodall, the primatologist and anthropologist whose research changed the way we look at primates, died last week at the age of 91. She once said she believed in a “higher power”. That higher power, Dr Goodall said, was what we found in nature.
In a world where heroes are so scarce – where so many right-wing leaders call climate change a hoax or a fairy tale, and where cuts to scientific research are sometimes becoming punitive – Dr Goodall stands as a model of integrity and perseverance.
A scientist who began her work in 1960 with no formal degree, no laboratory and no institutional funding, she ventured into the Tanzanian wilderness with little more than a notebook, binoculars and her mother for company. Mentored by the great Kenyan palaeoanthropologist Louis Leakey, she later earned her doctorate at Cambridge. But much of her pioneering fieldwork was done alone, guided by instinct, patience and profound observation. To me, Dr Goodall represents science as a vocation, not a bureaucracy.
She is mourned by countless fans in the scientific community in the US, which has been suffering lately. The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health face constant cuts and political interference. Environmental and climate research has been frozen or defunded. Programmes on biodiversity and renewable energy are deemed “nonessential”. The assault is not just on budgets but on truth itself – on the idea that facts, data and evidence can guide moral action. In this case, climate change and conservation.
In recent years, particularly under Republican administrations, entire research initiatives have been gutted. The Environmental Protection Agency’s climate division saw its funding slashed, the Department of Energy’s renewables programmes were rolled back, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration lost projects that monitored rising sea levels and Arctic melt.
What was terrifying for me was that even during the Covid-19 pandemic, basic public health research became politicised, with scientists harassed or silenced for publishing data that challenged political narratives. President Donald Trump has singled out Dr Anthony Fauci, who led the country through the pandemic as director of the National Institute of Health, as an object of derision. The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, once a gold standard for global health, fights for autonomy against political appointees editing its reports. The Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has demonstrated a distrust for long-accepted science and vaccines.
America is about innovation – but knowledge is being punished and seen as resistance, or troublemaking. To do what Jane Goodall once did in the forests of Africa – to persist quietly, to observe with integrity and to keep faith in the truth even as the world turns away – seems impossible in today’s America.
By contrast, Goodall’s camp at Gombe National Park in Tanzania was hand-built, funded by small donations and driven by imagination rather than bureaucracy. Her lab was the wild forest; her instruments were patience and intuition. She lived with the risks of storms, wild animals and disease, but also with the rare clarity that comes from purpose. She endured isolation, malaria and the scepticism of her peers, yet she persisted. She reminded us that knowledge is not something acquired just in laboratories, but something earned through humility, attention and devotion – field work. Well into her eighties, she travelled more than 300 days a year – a woman who refused to slow down because the planet she loved could not afford her rest.
Long before #MeToo, she operated in a male-dominated, often condescending world. Like many of us who had no option, she just put her head down and worked. She was dismissed as “a secretary playing scientist” and accused of being too emotional. When she finally won support from the National Geographic Society, it was conditional: they sent a man along to ensure the reliability of her work. That man, the filmmaker Hugo van Lawick, later became her husband.
There was loneliness, too – the solitude that comes from living by your own rules. She raised her son, Hugo, in the open forest, balancing motherhood with fieldwork, torn between her child and her chimps. “It was the constant pull between the chimpanzees and my child,” she said – a tension between personal love and global responsibility.
Even after she secured funding, Dr Goodall was told to strip the empathy from her observations. She refused. She loved her chimps. In an era obsessed with control and conformity, she showed that real discovery begins with defiance. She learned that chimpanzees made tools, fought, hunted and grieved. Shattering taboos, she gave them names and emotions. “The chimpanzees helped to open science’s closed mind,” she said.
As a conservationist and a UN Messenger of Peace, she spent her life warning us that the survival of our planet depends on humility and wonder. She taught that reverence for nature is not romanticism – it’s realism.
As a woman who came of age also working in a male-dominated world, I loved Jane Goodall for what she symbolised. In a world in short supply of heroes, she is mine, and I gain inspiration from her every day. What can we learn from her now? For me, it’s her patience, endurance, and moral clarity – her refusal to despair. In a world where attention spans are the length of a TikTok video, she embodied persistence. She sat quietly in Gombe, notebook in hand, bearing witness for years.
She taught us that science, like compassion, is an act of faith. And above all, she taught us to never give up. As she once told her granddaughter, Angel: “Never lose hope.”
