Jane Goodall returned to Cornell last week in her capacity as A.D. White Professor-at-Large to again share information on her revolutionary work with chimpanzees and her concern for the environment. But, as this year's Sept. 15 public lecture began in Bailey Hall, she wasn't quite herself.
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| Jane Goodall addresses a Bailey Hall crowd Sept. 15. Charles Harrington/University Photography |
A few minutes before the noted researcher was supposed to appear on stage -- and after a video of her life was shown, called "Reason for Hope" -- the crowd filling the hall was told that Goodall had malaria and was unable to attend. The audience fell silent, and people looked at each other with concern and disappointment. Meanwhile, the playful primatologist slipped out from behind the curtain in disguise as a fill-in speaker, wearing a trench coat stuffed with pillows, glasses and a tight bun of white hair.
Forty years ago, Goodall's hair was blonde and she was a young assistant to another famous researcher, paleontologist and anthropologist Dr. Louis Leakey, in the African jungles of Kenya.
Without any formal scientific training, she soon became the first person to document the daily lives of chimpanzees, discovering, among other things, their ability to create and use tools. And when National Geographic began using cameras to follow her interactions with the animals at Gombe National Park in Tanzania, Goodall became a household name.
She has studied the same community of chimpanzees throughout her career, and hers is now the longest continuous study of any group of animals in their natural habitat. Her observations and writings have rocked the scientific world, at first because of her "nonscientific" approach.
"[When I began], you couldn't call a chimp by name, you had to say 'it,'" she said. "You couldn't say 'who,' you had to say 'which.'"
It wasn't just that Goodall referred to her animal subjects with personal pronouns that raised eyebrows among her colleagues, but also that she referred to them by using names: Gallahad, David Graybeard and Fifi, for example.
Since 1986, Goodall has spent much of her time on airplanes, traveling around the world to promote environmental causes and the work of the Jane Goodall Institute, which was formed to help fight for the chimpanzees in Gombe, who are threatened by human interventions. And at each of her stops, she concentrates on the youngest members of her audiences. She said she learned to love animals from the books she read as a child, such as Dr. Doolittle and Tarzan of the Apes.
"Children's attitudes toward animals can flavor their whole lives," Goodall told her audience.
During the question-and-answer period following the lecture, Goodall called children up to the microphones first.
When Rotem Ayaloy '02, a member of the Cornell chapter of Goodall's student environmental action group, Roots and Shoots, got her turn to ask Goodall a question, she wanted advice on attracting more young Cornellians to her cause.
Saying Ivy League students seem to be less concerned with the environment and other outside causes and more concerned with being competitive, Goodall added: "It will be a few years from now, when you leave the university and start thinking about a family, that you'll begin to worry 'what sort of world am I bringing this child into?'"
Goodall has been a Cornell A.D. Professor-at-Large since 1997 and during that time has made three trips to campus to teach, lecture and spend time with students and faculty members. In 1995, she delivered the Olin Lecture at Cornell. Her visit this past week also included a classroom lecture, a fund-raising luncheon for the Jane Goodall Institute and a bush planting at the opening of the Roots and Shoots Butterfly Garden in Cornell Plantations.
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