Jane Goodall Biography

Influential Animal Right Activist

Jane Goodall

Born : 3 April 1934 (London, England, UK)

Known for: Study of Chimpanzees | Conservation | Animal Welfare

Thesis: Behaviour of Free-living Chimpanzees

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Who is Jane Goodall?

Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall was born in 1934 in Hampstead, London, to businessman Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall (1907–2001) and Margaret Myfanwe Joseph (1906–2000), a novelist from Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, who wrote under the name Vanne Morris-Goodall. The family later moved to Bournemouth, and Goodall attended Uplands School, an independent school in nearby Poole. As a child, as an alternative to a teddy bear, Goodall's father gave her a stuffed chimpanzee named Jubilee. Goodall has said her fondness for this figure started her early love of animals, commenting, "My mother's friends were horrified by this toy, thinking it would frighten me and give me nightmares." Today, Jubilee still sits on Goodall's dresser in London. Dame Jane Morris Goodall DBE (born Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall on 3 April 1934), formerly Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall, is an English primatologist and anthropologist. Seen as the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees, Goodall is best known for her 60-year study of social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees since she first went to Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania in 1960, where she witnessed human-like behaviours amongst chimpanzees, including armed conflict. In April 2002, she was named a UN Messenger of Peace. Goodall is an honorary member of the World Future Council.

Jane Goodall Institute

In 1977, Goodall established the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI), which supports the Gombe research, and she is a global leader in the effort to protect chimpanzees and their habitats. With nineteen offices around the world, the JGI is widely recognised for community-centred conservation and development programs in Africa. Its global youth program, Roots & Shoots, began in 1991 when a group of 16 local teenagers met with Goodall on her back porch in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. They were eager to discuss a range of problems they knew about from first-hand experience that caused them deep concern. The organisation now has over 10,000 groups in over 100 countries.