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JANE GOODALL’S LEGACY: THREE WAYS SHE CHANGED SCIENCE  
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Rachel Fieldhouse and Mohana Basu
October 2, 2025
Nature [[link removed]]

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_ The primatologist challenged what it meant to be a scientist. _

Jane Goodall considers this her favorite animal memory, image: screen
grab

 

Jane Goodall, a British primatologist known for her work with
chimpanzees, died on Wednesday 1 October, aged 91. She was in
California on a speaking tour and died of natural causes, according to
the Jane Goodall Institute.

Goodall is best known for her work with chimpanzees in Gombe National
Park in Tanzania. She was the first to discover that chimpanzees made
and used tools1
[[link removed]]. She went
on to become an advocate for conservation, human rights and animal
welfare, including stopping the use of animals in medical research.
She established the Jane Goodall Institute, a non-profit wildlife and
conservation organization in Washington DC, in 1977.

Here are the ways in which Goodall’s legacy will endure.

Humanizing primates

While studying for her PhD at the University of Cambridge, UK, in the
early 1960s, Goodall broke with the scientific convention of using
numbers to identify animals, assigning them names instead. She named a
male chimp with silver facial hair David Greybeard. This change upset
senior scientists at the time, but it is now common practice
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use animal names.

“It was criticized as unscientific,” says Mireya Mayor, an
anthropologist and primatologist at Florida International University
in Miami, “but she proved that science could extend its boundaries
without losing rigour.”

Goodall was among the first to show that animals had emotions, empathy
and culture, traits that had been reserved for humans, Mayor says. Her
research changed how animal studies were conducted, she adds.

Her discoveries in Gombe National Park “redefined humanity”, says
Nick Boyle, executive director of Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia.
Goodall challenged the idea that chimpanzees were herbivores, and
showed that they ate meat, hunted and engaged in warfare, he adds. In
1973, Goodall observed a social divide between two chimpanzee
communities that led to a four-year conflict and the deaths of all of
the male apes in one of the communities.

Inspiring women scientists

Beyond primatology, Goodall’s legacy is the generations of women she
inspired to follow in her footsteps into fieldwork, says Mayor. In
1961, Goodall was one of the few students accepted into a PhD at
Cambridge without an undergraduate degree. She completed her PhD in
1965.

“She showed that a young woman with no formal scientific training
could rewrite science and the understanding of animals on such a
fundamental level,” adds Mayor.

Alison Behie, an anthropologist at the Australian National University,
was one of the women Goodall inspired. After attending a talk by
Goodall, Behie says she switched her undergraduate major from
microbiology to anthropology and started taking primatology and
conservation courses. “It was just a happy coincidence, but she came
to speak at the exact time that I was not quite sure what sort of
science I wanted to do,” she says.

In 2017, Behie introduced eight of her female students to Goodall
during her visit to Australia. “It was a full circle for me to be
able to show my own students what had inspired me to go down this
path.”

Communicating science

The secret to Goodall’s impact and popularity is that she made her
research relatable, says Behie. Goodall connected the science to
things that people worry and care about, such as the relationship
between a mother and child, and showed how similar chimpanzees are to
people. She made them care about places and animals that were far
away, adds Mayor.

She was a talented storyteller, which helped her to connect with the
public and engage them on important issues, says Euan Ritchie, a
conservation scientist at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia.
She showed it is possible for researchers to be advocates and science
communicators and be taken seriously, he says.

Long-time collaborator Thomas Gillespie, a disease ecologist at Emory
University in Atlanta, Georgia, says that Goodall was an introvert, so
her success and ability to connect with the public required a lot of
discipline.

She always made time for young people, says Boyle. “She was a
messenger of hope” and she saw that young people were so crucial in
that, he adds. Her youth programme, Roots and Shoots, established in
1991, was a way to educate young people and involve them in
conservation efforts. “That was her baby,” says Maria Sykes, chief
executive of the Jane Goodall Institute Australia.

But there were sides to Goodall that the public was unlikely to see,
says Mayor. “What most people don't know,” Mayor says, is that
“Jane was incredibly fun and flirtatious, even at 90”.

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References

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Goodall, J. _Nature_ 201, 1264–1266 (1964).

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