[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.

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