[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 171 (Monday, December 20, 2010)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10810-S10813]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
TRIBUTE TO DR. JANE GOODALL
Mr. UDALL of New Mexico. Mr. President, in July I introduced S. Res.
581, a resolution honoring the educational and scientific significance
of Dr. Jane Goodall on the 50th anniversary of the beginning of her
work in what is today Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. I would
like to urge my colleagues to support this resolution, which also has a
companion bill that was passed with unanimous support in the House of
Representatives on July 28 of this year; and I would like to have
printed in the Record the article printed in the October 2010 edition
of National Geographic. The article, entitled ``Fifty Years at Gombe,''
describes Dr. Goodall's lifetime of dedication and contribution to our
understanding of chimpanzees and the natural world, as well as her
unique and heroic personality. As described in the article, Dr. Goodall
``made three observations that rattled the comfortable wisdoms of
physical anthropology: meat eating by chimps--that had been presumed
vegetarian--tool use by chimps--in the form of plant stems probed into
termite mounds--and toolmaking--stripping leaves from stems--supposedly
a unique trait of human premeditation. Each of those discoveries
further narrowed the perceived gap of intelligence and culture between
Homo sapiens and Pan troglodytes.''
As a leading researcher, conservationist, and humanitarian, Dr.
Goodall has made remarkable contributions to our understanding of the
species with whom we live. She has led by example in efforts to ensure
that these species continue to thrive and to ensure that surrounding
communities are also able to thrive.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record
the article to which I referred.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From National Geographic Magazine, Oct. 2010]
Fifty Years at Gombe
(By David Quammen)
In 1960 a spirited animal lover with no scientific training
set up camp in Tanganyika's Gombe Stream Game Reserve to
observe chimpanzees. Today Jane Goodall's name is synonymous
with the protection of a beloved species. At Gombe--one of
the longest, most detailed studies of any wild animal--
revelations about chimps keep coming.
Most of us don't enter upon our life's destiny at any
neatly discernible time. Jane Goodall did.
On the morning of July 14, 1960, she stepped onto a pebble
beach along a remote stretch of the east shore of Lake
Tanganyika. It was her first arrival at what was then called
the Gombe Stream Game Reserve, a small protected area that
had been
[[Page S10811]]
established by the British colonial government back in 1943.
She had brought a tent, a few tin plates, a cup without a
handle, a shoddy pair of binoculars, an African cook named
Dominic, and--as a companion, at the insistence of people who
feared for her safety in the wilds of pre-independence
Tanganyika--her mother. She had come to study chimpanzees. Or
anyway, to try. Casual observers expected her to fail. One
person, the paleontologist Louis Leakey, who had recruited
her to the task up in Nairobi, believed she might succeed.
A group of local men, camped near their fishing nets along
the beach, greeted the Goodall party and helped bring up the
gear. Jane and her mother spent the afternoon putting their
camp in order. Then, around 5 p.m., somebody reported having
seen a chimpanzee. ``So off we went,'' Jane wrote later that
night in her journal, ``and there was the chimp.'' She had
gotten only a distant, indistinct glimpse. ``It moved away as
we drew level with the crowd of fishermen gazing at it, and,
though we climbed the neighbouring slope, we didn't see it
again.'' But she had noticed, and recorded, some bent
branches flattened together in a nearby tree: a chimp nest.
That datum, that first nest, was the starting point of what
has become one of the most significant ongoing sagas in
modern field biology: the continuous, minutely detailed, 50-
year study, by Jane Goodall and others, of the behavior of
the chimps of Gombe.
Science history, with the charm of a fairy-tale legend,
records some of the high points and iconic details of that
saga. Young Miss Goodall had no scientific credentials when
she began, not even an undergraduate degree. She was a
bright, motivated secretarial school graduate from England
who had always loved animals and dreamed of studying them in
Africa. She came from a family of strong women, little money,
and absent men. During the early weeks at Gombe she
struggled, groping for a methodology, losing time to a fever
that was probably malaria, hiking many miles in the forested
mountains, and glimpsing few chimpanzees, until an elderly
male with grizzled chin whiskers extended to her a tentative,
startling gesture of trust. She named the old chimp David
Greybeard. Thanks partly to him, she made three observations
that rattled the comfortable wisdoms of physical
anthropology: meat eating by chimps (who had been presumed
vegetarian), tool use by chimps (in the form of plant stems
probed into termite mounds), and toolmaking (stripping leaves
from stems), supposedly a unique trait of human
premeditation. Each of those discoveries further narrowed the
perceived gap of intelligence and culture between Homo
sapiens and Pan troglodytes.
The toolmaking observation was the most epochal of the
three, causing a furor within anthropological circles because
``man the toolmaker'' held sway as an almost canonical
definition of our species. Louis Leakey, thrilled by Jane's
news, wrote to her: ``Now we must redefine `tool,' redefine
`man,' or accept chimpanzees as humans.'' It was a memorable
line, marking a very important new stage in thinking about
human essence. Another interesting point to remember is that,
paradigm shifting or not, all three of those most celebrated
discoveries were made by Jane (everyone calls her Jane; there
is no sensible way not to call her Jane) within her first
four months in the field. She got off to a fast start. But
the real measure of her work at Gombe can't be taken with
such a short ruler.
The great thing about Gombe is not that Jane Goodall
``redefined'' humankind but that she set a new standard, a
very high standard, for behavioral study of apes in the wild,
focusing on individual characteristics as well as collective
patterns. She created a research program, a set of protocols
and ethics, an intellectual momentum--she created, in fact, a
relationship between the scientific world and one community
of chimpanzees--that has grown far beyond what one woman
could do. The Gombe project has enlarged in many dimensions,
has endured crises, has evolved to serve purposes that
neither she nor Louis Leakey foresaw, and has come to embrace
methods (satellite mapping, endocrinology, molecular
genetics) and address questions that carry far beyond the
field of animal behavior. For instance, techniques of
molecular analysis, applied to fecal and urine samples that
can be gathered without need for capture and handling, reveal
new insights about genetic relationships among the chimps and
the presence of disease microbes in some of them. Still, a
poignant irony that lies near the heart of this scientific
triumph, on its golden anniversary, is that the more we learn
about the chimps of Gombe, the more we have cause to worry
for their continued survival.
Two revelations in particular have raised concern. One
involves geography, the other involves disease. The world's
most beloved and well-studied population of chimpanzees is
isolated on an island of habitat that's too small for long-
term viability. And now some of them seem to be dying from
their version of AIDS.
The issue of how to study chimpanzees, and of what can be
inferred from behavioral observations, has faced Jane Goodall
since early in her career. It began coming into focus after
her first field season, when Louis Leakey informed Jane of
his next bright idea for shaping her life: He would get
her into a Ph.D. program in ethology at Cambridge
University.
This doctorate seemed a stretch on two counts. First, her
lack of any undergraduate degree whatsoever. Second, she had
always aspired to be a naturalist, or maybe a journalist, but
the word ``scientist'' hadn't figured in her dreaming. ``I
didn't even know what ethology was,'' she told me recently.
``I had to wait quite a while before I realized it simply
meant studying behavior.'' Once enrolled at Cambridge, she
found herself crosswise with departmental elders and the
prevailing certitudes of the field. ``It was a bit shocking
to be told I'd done everything wrong. Everything.'' By then
she had 15 months of field data from Gombe, most of it
gathered through patient observation of individuals she knew
by monikers such as David Greybeard, Mike, Olly, and Fifi.
Such personification didn't play well at Cambridge; to impute
individuality and emotion to nonhuman animals was
anthropomorphism, not ethology. ``Fortunately, I thought back
to my first teacher, when I was a child, who taught me that
that wasn't true.'' Her first teacher had been her dog,
Rusty. ``You cannot share your life in a meaningful way with
any kind of animal with a reasonably well-developed brain and
not realize that animals have personalities.'' She pushed
back against the prevailing view--one thing about gentle
Jane, she always pushes back--and on February 9, 1966, she
became Dr. Jane Goodall.
In 1968 the little game reserve underwent its own
graduation, becoming Tanzania's Gombe National Park. By then
Jane was receiving research funding from the National
Geographic Society. She was married and a mother and famous
worldwide, owing in part to her articles for this magazine
and her comely, forceful presence in a televised film, Miss
Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees. She had institutionalized
her field camp, in order to fund and perpetuate it, as the
Gombe Stream Research Center (GSRC). In 1971 she published In
the Shadow of Man, her account of the early Gombe studies and
adventures, which became a best seller. Around the same time,
she began hosting students and graduate researchers to help
with chimp-data collection and other research at Gombe. Her
influence on modern primatology, noisily bruited about by
Leakey, is more quietly suggested by the long list of Gombe
alums who have gone on to do important scientific work,
including Richard Wrangham, Caroline Tutin, Craig Packer, Tim
Clutton-Brock, Geza Teleki, William McGrew, Anthony Collins,
Shadrack Kamenya, Jim Moore, and Anne Pusey. The last of
those, Pusey, now professor and chair of evolutionary
anthropology at Duke University, also serves the Jane Goodall
Institute (established in 1977) as director of its Center for
Primate Studies. Among other duties, she curates the 22 file
cabinets full of field data--the notebooks and journal pages
and check sheets, some in English, some in Swahili--from 50
years of chimp study at Gombe.
That 50-year run suffered one traumatic interruption. On
the night of May 19, 1975, three young Americans and a Dutch
woman were kidnapped by rebel soldiers who had come across
Lake Tanganyika from Zaire. The four hostages were eventually
released, but it no longer seemed prudent for the Gombe
Stream Research Center to welcome expatriate researchers and
helpers--as Anthony Collins explained to me.
Collins was then a young British biologist with muttonchop
sideburns and a strong interest in baboons, the other most
conspicuous primate at Gombe. In addition to his baboon
research, he has continued to play important administrative
roles in the Jane Goodall Institute and at GSRC itself, off
and on, for almost 40 years. He recalls May 19, 1975, as
``the day the world changed, as far as Gombe was concerned.''
Collins was absent that night but returned promptly to help
cope with the aftermath. ``It was not entirely bad,'' he told
me. The bad part was that foreign researchers could no longer
work at Gombe; Jane herself couldn't work there, not without
a military escort, for some years. ``The good thing about it
was that the responsibility for data collection went
straightaway, the following day, to the Tanzanian field
staff.'' Those Tanzanians had each received at least a year's
training in data collection but still functioned partly as
trackers, helping locate the chimps, identifying plants, and
making sure the mzungu (white) researchers got back to camp
safely each night before dark. Then came the kidnapping,
whereupon the Tanzanians stepped up, and ``on that day the
baton was passed to them,'' Collins said. Only one day's
worth of data was missed. Today the chief of chimpanzee
researchers at Gombe is Gabo Paulo, supervising the field
observations and data gathering of Methodi Vyampi, Magombe
Yahaya, Amri Yahaya, and 20 other Tanzanians.
Human conflicts overflowing from neighboring countries
weren't the only sort of tribulation that affected Gombe.
Chimpanzee politics could also be violent. Beginning in 1974,
the Kasekela community (the main focus of Gombe research)
conducted a series of bloody raids against a smaller subgroup
called Kahama. That period of aggression, known in Gombe
annals as the Four Year War, led to the death of some
individuals, the annihilation of the Kahama subgroup, and the
annexation of its territory by Kasekela. Even within the
Kasekela community, struggles among males for the alpha
position are highly political and physical, while among
females there have been cases of one mother killing a rival
mother's infant. ``When I first started at Gombe,'' Jane has
written, ``I thought the chimps were nicer
[[Page S10812]]
than we are. But time has revealed that they are not. They
can be just as awful.''
Gombe was never Eden. Disease intruded too. In 1966 came an
outbreak of something virulent (probably polio, contracted
from humans nearby), and six chimps died or disappeared. Six
others were partially paralyzed. Two years later, David
Greybeard and four others vanished while a respiratory bug
(influenza? bacterial pneumonia?) swept through. Nine more
chimps died in early 1987 from pneumonia. These episodes,
reflecting the susceptibility of chimps to human-carried
pathogens, help explain why scientists at Gombe are acutely
concerned with the subject of infectious disease.
That concern has been heightened by landscape changes
outside the park boundaries. Over the decades people in the
surrounding villages have struggled to live ordinary lives--
cutting firewood from the steep hillsides, planting crops on
those slopes, burning the grassy and scrubby areas each dry
season for fertilizing ash, having babies, and trying to feed
them. By the early 1990s deforestation and erosion had made
Gombe National Park an ecological island, surrounded by human
impact on three sides and Lake Tanganyika on the fourth.
Within that island lived no more than about a hundred
chimpanzees. By all the standards of conservation biology, it
wasn't enough to constitute a viable population for the long
term--not enough to ensure against negative effects of
inbreeding, and not enough to stand steady against an
epidemic caused by the next nasty bug, which might be more
transmissible than polio, more lethal than flu. Something had
to be done, Jane realized, besides continued study of a
fondly regarded population of apes that might be doomed.
Furthermore, something had to be done for the people as
well as for the chimps.
In a nearby town she met a German-born agriculturist,
George Strunden, and with his help created TACARE (originally
the Lake Tanganyika Catchment Reforestation and Education
project), whose first effort, in 1995, established tree
nurseries in 24 villages. The goals were to reverse the
denudation of hillsides, to protect village watersheds, and
maybe eventually to reconnect Gombe with outlying patches of
forest (some of which also harbor chimpanzees) by helping the
villagers plant trees. For instance, there's a small
population of chimps in a patch of forest called Kwitanga,
about ten miles east of Gombe. To the southeast, about 50
miles, an ecosystem known as Masito-Ugalla supports more than
500 chimps. If either area could be linked to Gombe by
reforested corridors, the chimps would benefit from increased
gene flow and population size. Then again, they might be hurt
by sharing diseases.
By any measure, it's a near-impossible challenge.
Proceeding carefully, patiently, Jane and her people have
achieved some encouraging gains in the form of community
cooperation, decreased burning, and natural forest
regeneration.
On the second morning of my Gombe visit, along a trail not
far above the house in which Jane has lived intermittently
since the early 1970s, I encountered a group of chimpanzees.
They were noodling their way cross slope on a relaxed search
for breakfast, moving mostly on the ground, but occasionally
up into a Vitex tree to eat the small purple-black berries,
and were seemingly indifferent to my presence and that of the
Tanzanian researchers. They included some individuals whose
names, or at least their family histories, were familiar.
Here was Gremlin (daughter of Melissa, a young female when
Jane first arrived), Gremlin's daughter Gaia (with a clinging
infant), Gaia's younger sister Golden, Pax (son of the
notoriously cannibalistic Passion), and Fudge (son of Fanni,
grandson of Fifi, great-grandson of Flo, the beloved, ugly-
nosed matriarch famous from Jane's early books). Here also
was Titan, a very large male, 15 years old, and still rising
toward his prime. The rules at Gombe National Park say that
you must not approach closely to a chimpanzee, but the tricky
thing on a given day is to keep the chimps from approaching
closely to you. When Titan came striding up the trail, burly
and confident, we all squeezed to the edge and let him
swagger past, within inches. A lifetime of familiarity with
innocuous human researchers, their notebooks, and their check
sheets, has left him blase.
Another reflection of casualness: Gremlin defecated on the
trail not far from where we stood, and then Golden too
relieved herself. Once they had ambled away, a researcher
named Samson Shadrack Pindu pulled on yellow latex gloves and
moved in. He crouched over Gremlin's dollop of fibrous olive
dung, using a small plastic scoop to transfer a bit into a
specimen tube, which he labeled with time, date, location,
and Gremlin's name. The tube contained a stabilizing liquid
called RNAlater, which preserves any RNA (from, for instance,
a retrovirus) for later genetic analysis. That tube and
others like it, representing one fecal sample every month
from as many chimps as possible, were destined for the
laboratory of Beatrice Hahn at the University of Alabama in
Birmingham, who for ten years has been studying simian
immunodeficiency virus at Gombe.
Simian immunodeficiency virus in chimpanzees, known
technically as SIVcpz, is the precursor and origin of HIV-1,
the virus that accounts for most cases of AIDS around the
world. (There is also an HIV-2.) Notwithstanding the name,
SIVcpz had never been found to cause immune system failure in
wild chimpanzees--until Hahn's expertise in molecular
genetics converged with the long-term observational data
available at Gombe. In fact, SIVcpz was thought to be
harmless in chimps, an assumption that raised questions about
how or why it has visited such a lethal pandemic upon humans.
Had a few, fateful mutations changed an innocuous chimp virus
into a human killer? That line of thought had to be modified
after publication of a 2009 paper in the journal Nature, with
Brandon F. Keele (then at Hahn's lab) as first author and
Beatrice Hahn and Jane Goodall among the co-authors. The
Keele paper reported that SIV-positive chimps at Gombe
suffered between ten times and 16 times more risk of death at
a given age than SIV-negative chimps. And three SIV-positive
carcasses have been found, their tissues (based on lab work
at the molecular level) showing signs of damage resembling
AIDS. The implications are stark. An AIDS-like illness seems
to be killing some of Gombe's chimps.
Of all the bonds, shared features, and similarities that
link our species with theirs, this revelation is perhaps the
most troubling. ``It's very scary, knowing the chimps seem to
be dying at a younger age,'' Jane told me. ``I mean, how long
has it been there? Where does it come from? How is it
affecting other populations?'' For the sake of chimpanzee
survival throughout Africa, those questions urgently need to
be studied.
But this gloomy discovery also carries huge potential
significance for AIDS research in humans. Anthony Collins
pointed out that although SIV has been found elsewhere in
chimp communities, ``none of them is a study population
habituated to human observers; and certainly none of them is
one which has genealogical information going right back in
time; and none is so tame that you can take samples from
every individual every month.'' After a moment, he added,
``It's very sad that the virus is here, but a lot of
knowledge can come out of it. And understanding.''
The fancy new methods of molecular genetics bring more than
just dire revelations about disease. They also bring the
exciting, cheerful capacity to address certain long-standing
mysteries about chimpanzee social dynamics and evolution. For
instance: Who are the fathers at Gombe? Motherhood is
obvious, and the intimate relations between mothers and
infants have been well studied by Jane herself, Anne Pusey,
and others. But because female chimps tend to mate
promiscuously with many males, paternity has been far harder
to determine. And the question of paternal identity relates
to another question: How does male competition for status
within the hierarchy--all that blustering effort expended to
achieve and hold the rank of alpha--correlate with
reproductive success? A young scientist named Emily
Wroblewski, analyzing DNA from fecal samples gathered by the
field team, has reached an answer. She found that the higher
ranking males do succeed in fathering many chimps--but that
some low-ranking males make out pretty well too. The strategy
involves investing effort in a consortship--an exclusive
period of spending time as a pair, traveling together, and
mating--often with younger, less desirable females.
Jane herself had predicted this finding, from observational
data, two decades earlier. ``The male who successfully
initiates and maintains a consortship with a fertile
female,'' she wrote, ``probably has a better chance of
fathering her child than he would in the group situation,
even if he were alpha.''
Impelled by broader imperatives, Jane ended her career as a
field biologist in 1986, just after publication of her great
scientific book, The Chimpanzees of Gombe. Since then she has
lived as an advocate, a traveling lecturer, a woman driven by
a sense of public mission. What's the mission? Her first
cause, which arose from her years at Gombe, was improving the
grim treatment inflicted on chimpanzees held in many medical
research labs. Combining her toughness and moral outrage with
her personal charm and willingness to interact graciously,
she achieved some negotiated successes. She also founded
sanctuaries for chimps who could be freed from captivity,
including many orphaned by the bush-meat trade. That work led
to her concerns about human conduct toward other species. She
established a program called Jane Goodall's Roots & Shoots,
encouraging young people around the world to become active in
projects that promote greater concern for animals, the
environment, and the human community. During this period she
became an explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic
Society. She now spends about 300 days a year on the road,
giving countless interviews and schoolroom talks, lecturing
in big venues, meeting with government officials, raising
money to turn the wheels of the Jane Goodall Institute.
Occasionally she sneaks away into a forest or onto a prairie,
sometimes with a few friends, to watch chimps or sandhill
cranes or black-footed ferrets and to restore her energy and
sanity.
Fifty years ago Louis Leakey sent her to study chimpanzees
because he thought their behavior might cast light on human
ancestors, his chosen subject. Jane ignored that part of the
mandate and studied chimps for their own sake, their own
interest, their own value. While doing that, she created
institutions and opportunities that have yielded richly in
the work of other scientists, as well as a luminous personal
example that has brought many young women and men into
science and conservation. It's important to
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remember that the meaning of Gombe, after half a century, is
bigger than Jane Goodall's life and work. But make no
mistake: Her life and work have been very, very big.
____________________