— 8 —

Crusader: The Moral
Dilemma of Jane Goodall

Jane Goodall’s smile has vanished. She thinks I have looked away. The smile was there half a second ago; it had seemed as sincere and welcoming as the sunny back yard of The Birches, her family’s country home in the seaside town of Bournemouth, England, where I am visiting her on my way to my second trip to Africa in the summer of 1989. There were even dancing little wrinkles at the corners of Jane’s eyes. But the curve of her lips dropped faster than a ripe fruit from a tree, leaving no trace of amusement or pleasure. This smile was a monument to British courtesy—not only to produce a smile, but to make it look real. Had I not looked back, I could comfortably have thought she was not unhappy, at least for that moment.

But no; now the smile has disappeared, Jane looks like a middle-aged woman who desperately needs to lie down with a wet cloth over her eyes; instead, she is springing up to bring a tray of hot tea to the back yard from the kitchen, trying to decide whether she should prune a dinner engagement down to just drinks so she has time to write a tribute to a National Geographic colleague, and rushing inside to answer the incessant telephone. (“Sit down and relax, Jane,” exhorts her peppy octogenarian mother, only to have Jane volley back the same phrase moments later.)

Finally Jane does sit down in a lawn chair to share a lunch of hot macaroni and cheese with her family. They’re all together now at The Birches, where Jane grew up: her aunt Olly, a physiotherapist, who regularly massages the hind legs of her two elderly tortoises, Romeo and Juliet (Romeo apparently has arthritis, and Juliet’s back leg was dislocated once when Romeo got amorous); the effervescent Vanne, her auburn hair done in motherly curls with stately white tufts at the temples; Jane’s suntanned and sun-blond son, Hugo, who still goes by his nickname Grub; and a shaggy medium-sized dog named Cida. It’s a glorious, hot late May day in 1989, and the garden is drenched in vanilla sunlight; fat bees bumble lazily between clovers, and tits crack nuts from a hanging feeder.

But on the beaches of the Canary Islands, drugged baby chimpanzees dressed in clothes are “performing” for tourists; in the laboratories of medical research facilities, AIDS-infected chimps are rocking autistically in unlit cages; and in the dwindling rain forests of Africa, chimpanzee mothers are shot, their babies stolen. These are the scenes that infect this lovely day with Jane’s family, spreading like a bloodstain on a linen tablecloth.

Grub has just returned from a “secret mission” in Spain: the son of the world’s most famous primatologist went undercover to document the beach chimps at the southern resorts. They’re dressed up in baby clothes and diapers that are never changed, paraded around in the sun all day and in the nightclubs under blaring lights at night, their thumbed feet crammed into tight little shoes. The owners of these smuggled babies shove the chimps into the arms of tourists and take a picture that sells for ten dollars. A few of the chimps have been rescued; their bodies were covered with cigarette burns.

This cruelty recalls another: the fate of one of the four chimps who, wearing a twelve-ounce latex “gorilla suit,” played the orphaned baby gorilla Pucker in the film based on Fossey’s life, Gorillas in the Mist. Jane relates how after the working conditions had been carefully inspected and approved, one of the chimp actors, its job completed, ended up in a medical lab.

Jane relates these vignettes falteringly, like an exhausted walker who is tripping over stones. The images waft like ghosts wandering from one ring of hell to another: veal calves crammed into squalid pens on factory farms; drugs smuggled inside the bodies of animals; oil-soaked birds in Alaska after the Exxon oil spill.

And the medical labs. Their steel bars, it seems, are always clanging in her skull, like a lingering headache after a long fever. But it’s all of a piece: man’s arrogance. “To think that animals don’t feel pain, or have emotions, or consciousness. Just monstrous. It’s a nonsense.”

But isn’t the garden beautiful today?

“There used to be butterflies all over the garden,” Jane remembers. “And turtles, wild turtles. Once I had a pet tortoise who escaped and returned the next day with a female. Now you don’t see tortoises here anymore. And birds—the woodpeckers are all gone. The pesticides have poisoned them. If I leave the windows open at night, I find only one insect in the room.” She then advises her mother to buy moth and butterfly eggs; the larvae will help feed the birds.

Talk turns to her schedule: fresh from opening the Jane Good-all Institute’s London branch the previous Friday, she must go to Edinburgh for a speech tomorrow, then to Germany next week, and then, in late June, an emergency trip to the United States to testify on behalf of the Improved Standards for Laboratory Animals Act, an amendment to the Animal Welfare Act. The U.S. trip will delay her return to Gombe; a month ago she had hoped to arrive in early June, then mid-June, and now it looks as though she may get there after the hearings conclude on June 26. In the past four years she has spent no more than three weeks in one place.

“It’s worth it for the chimps, I suppose,” she says, her words a sigh. She excuses herself to work on the National Geographic tribute—even the pared-down plan for drinks with the family friend must be canceled—and evaporates into the house.

The Goodall parlor was generous, welcoming, and very English, with sagging velvet easy chairs in greens and golds, fringed lampshades, pots of blooming flowers, and a large blow-up plastic snake coiled into the strike position on a divan. A photograph of toads copulating adorned an end table, and crowning the TV was a black-and-white picture of Jane, beaming, with the white-bearded Konrad Lorenz. Over the tiled fireplace hung an enormous photo of Jane at the Peak at Gombe: “Sun’s Fading Glow Silhouettes Jane Goodall,” read the caption reprinted from National Geographic. Taken by Hugo, it is a portrait of soul-soothing solitude: seated on the ground, her limbs coiled comfortably as a cat’s, Jane is surrounded by all she loves. The African night is about to enfold her, the last rays of the sun a lingering embrace. Here, especially in the early days, Jane would go to scan the rounded humps of fig trees below, voluptuous as moss, to listen for pant-hoots and watch for black shapes among the green. Here, with the stunted msagamba trees at her back, sitting on a stone the size of a Victorian plush chair seat, she offered her presence like a prayer: I am here, if you will show yourselves to me. I wait.

But no longer has she the luxury to watch and wait. This is a photo of what Jane has lost.

On that visit, I caught a glimpse of the penance Jane now pays for her years of bliss at Gombe. As if for each night she slept to the rhythm of Lake Tanganyika’s lapping waves, she must endure the drone of another airplane engine carrying her to Washington or London or New York. As if for each hour she watched Flo tickling a youngster, or juveniles circling a tree in play, she must now dissect the words of some medical researcher at a congressional hearing who’s outlining the need for more lab chimps. Once she groomed the hair of chimps she knew as personally as her own name; now she mainly visits chimps in laboratories, who hug themselves, rocking themselves insane, behind glass walls in autistic anonymity. Each face is a litany of pain. She remembers one small chimp in a lab cage so dark technicians used a flashlight to peer inside. Its eyes reminded her of those of a Burundi refugee boy she once met, whose family had been massacred; his stare was devoid of life or meaning.

Jane spends only a few weeks a year at Gombe these days. And when she does visit, she says, the place is mobbed by tourists: “I almost dread going back there in the summertime.” Cameras click as she washes her hair in the lake. “I felt as if I were in her bathroom,” one tourist confessed.

It seemed that even Jane’s beloved Birches had become a purgatory, taunted by memories of a garden once filled with butterflies, where trucks and cars now roar behind the hedges, and the occasional airplane drowns out back-yard conversation.

For years, and some claim even decades, animal rights activists and conservation groups begged Jane to throw her fame behind efforts to protect chimps around the world. For although the chimpanzees of Gombe seemed safe in a national park, thousands of other wild chimps were being killed as pests or for food or, more often, so their infants could be captured to serve as stand-ins for humans in laboratory experiments or to amuse people at zoos or TV viewers.

Geza Teleki, who worked with Jane at Gombe in the 1960s, later set up a national park in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Before the park protected them, chimpanzees there were routinely shot to supply meat markets in neighboring Liberia. Thousands more disappeared into medical research labs. Geza knows that for every chimp delivered to an overseas buyer, five to ten are killed or die in transit. Local poachers who cannot afford bullets sometimes make buckshot from metal shards; many times they kill the infant intended for capture as well as the mother holding it in her arms.

At Gombe Geza had seen Jane haggard, worrying over the fate of individual chimpanzees. He knew how she had suffered during the polio epidemic, and he’d seen her grieve over the deaths of chimps who used to frequent her camp. But she was strangely unmoved by the plight of the nameless chimps of Sierra Leone.

“The fact that she would not get involved really disappointed me,” Geza confessed. “I thought it was her responsibility, given her visibility. But she was very oriented toward individuals and very narrow about understanding general chimp problems. She knew everything about Gombe and nothing about chimps anywhere else.”

For more than half a century, capturing live chimpanzees has been a source of quick cash in poor African nations. The export market began with the entertainment industry and escalated with the increasing investment in biomedical research, beginning in the 1950s. Then civil wars put machine guns into hunters’ hands, and many of Goodall’s colleagues lost their study sites. By the 1970s chimpanzees were extinct in four of the twenty-five countries where they once ranged. Concern was so high that in 1976 chimpanzees were placed on the CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) threatened list—one rung below endangered in the hierarchy of protection.

Dr. Shirley McGreal was another conservation activist who tried to talk Jane into speaking out. “Jane Goodall was the most popular and powerful voice for animals possibly in the world, yet she wouldn’t speak out,” she said. “It was very frustrating to us.”

In her 1971 classic, In the Shadow of Man, Jane acknowledged the problem of poaching in a five-page chapter of the nearly three-hundred-page book. But she would not lend her name or testimony to fund-raising or publicity efforts to slow international traffic in infant chimpanzees; she could not be persuaded to talk to influential senators or congressmen about better conditions for captive chimps. When wild-eyed Dian Fossey was hunting down poachers and pestering ambassadors with gruesome photos of headless gorillas, Jane Goodall, always cool and poised, simply would not raise an unseemly fuss, for the chimpanzees of Gombe were safe.

Even longtime friends like Alan Root, the Nairobi-based wildlife photographer, were perplexed. “I mean, she is enormously concerned about individual chimps, but can’t see the overall picture at all,” he told an interviewer in 1985. “She’s got tremendous international clout and so on, but in fact, conservation-wise, she is absolutely above all and her idea of looking after chimps is making sure the individuals she knows are healthy. It’s very weird. She doesn’t seem to be able to see that even her own bloody park is under tremendous threat [from potential poaching]. She just doesn’t see beyond the individual groups that she studies.”

Then came the transformation. It happened at a conference organized by Dr. Paul Heltne, director of the Chicago Academy of Sciences, in November 1986. The symposium coincided with the publication of what Jane calls “the Big Book” (The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior—the scientific compilation of her study results of the previous twenty-six years). The conference was titled “Understanding Chimpanzees,” but the participants were less concerned with new instances of warfare or tool use than with the question of whether there would be any wild chimpanzees left to study at all. “Everyone was appalled at how bad the situation was for chimps everywhere in the world,” said Geza Teleki. “And she suddenly threw herself into the issue of protecting chimps, to an exhausting degree. Once she herself decides on something, she throws herself into it.”

Jane explained simply: “I owe it to the chimps.”

“It was as if Jane suddenly got religion,” one friend said. That weekend she and several other scientists organized the Committee for the Conservation and Care of Chimpanzees. The committee, backed by Jane’s impressive reputation and public appeal, was to document, in exhaustive scientific detail, that chimps should be listed as an endangered species and thus given more international protection, and that their psychological and physical well-being should be assured when they are incarcerated in labs and zoos.

The committee churned out powerful documentation. Jane lobbied legislators and bureaucrats in Washington, wrote opinion pieces for publications such as the New York Times, and toured medical laboratories where chimpanzees were being infected with human diseases. She called press conferences and made a spate of TV appearances focusing on the issue: “The Donahue Show,” “Nightline,” “Good Morning America,” “National Geographic Explorer,” “Nature Watch.” Her lectures took up the new theme. Her trips to Washington from London and Dar es Salaam increased from one or two per year to eight or ten.

Meanwhile her visits to Gombe were repeatedly postponed; her summer 1989 trip was delayed three times in two months. Fifi’s newest baby was more than a month old before she had a chance to name him, sight unseen, and more than two months old before her staff learned that the little male would be called Faustino. He was named after Princess Genevieve di San Faustino, who dreamed up the idea of the Jane Goodall Institute in the 1970s; but the name—“little Faust”—was an ominous one.

Some animal rights activists stayed angry for years that Jane didn’t jump into the fray earlier. Jane would rather not analyze the reasons for her previous silence. “I was very isolated in Tanzania, living my own little life, watching the chimps and writing about them; selfish in a way,” she admits. “I’ve often thought, well, I should feel guilty that I wasn’t in it long ago,” she says.

For the happiness of animals had concerned Jane since her early childhood. As a little girl, she would walk neighbors’ dogs when she considered they weren’t getting enough exercise. She formed a nature club with her sister and two other girls, then organized a museum in the family greenhouse, to which she charged admission; the fees were donated to a society that rescued old horses from butchers and put them out to graze. As an adult, when Jane watched wildebeest kills on the Serengeti with Hugo, tears would pour down her face.

Yet for decades Jane was haunted by her failure of courage in an incident during her childhood. She was moved to confess it in her 1988 children’s book, My Life with the Chimpanzees:

When I was about your age, I once saw four boys, much bigger than I was, pulling the legs off crabs. I was very upset. I asked them why they did it, and they said, “None of your business.” I told them it was cruel. They laughed. And I went away. Now, forty years later, I am still ashamed of myself. Why didn’t I try harder to stop them from tormenting those crabs?

Her own son, at age five, was braver, she continued: when he saw a seven-year-old boy at a nursery school hosing a terrified rabbit in its cage, Grub tried to pull the hose from his hands. When the boy wouldn’t let go, Grub fought him and won. The nursery school teacher, Jane remembered, punished Grub, not the other boy. “But Grub,” Jane wrote, “even though he was punished, knew he had done the right thing. He had stopped the tormenting of the rabbit.”

Should Jane have spoken out on behalf of chimpanzees earlier? Perhaps, she muses. “On the other hand, publishing [The Chimpanzees of Gombe] gave me the credibility that maybe I would have lacked in scientific circles. I think in fact that destiny determined the exact right moment to launch myself into it. I could not have done the book and this.”

But one cannot help but wonder if she remained silent for so long because she knew what speaking out would cost her.

In the early days Jane and Hugo sometimes hid bananas under their shirts to feed their friends at a convenient time. Of course it took no time for the chimps to figure this out. Hugo once snapped a wonderful photo of Jane standing at the edge of the forest as a squatting chimp peers up her safari shirt. Jane, a few wisps of blond hair loose from her ponytail, in a balletic, casual posture—left knee bent, right arm angled behind her curved back—looks down at the ape with a faint smile, as it lifts the cloth of her shirt so gently, delicately, by the tip of the third finger of the left hand, more tenderly than a groom lifts the wedding veil from his bride’s face. Such care, such grace, from a being confronted with her terrible human vulnerability.

If she then could have had a vision of her 1988 visit to the chimpanzees of IMMUNO, she would have dismissed it as a demented nightmare.

She looked as if she’d been swallowed by the Michelin Man. A movie camera filmed as she waddled down the antiseptic halls of the chimpanzee research lab run by the Austrian drug company IMMUNO, clad in a bulky white contamination suit, peering out through a rectangular plastic face mask the size of a small TV. The suit was equipped with its own purified air supply.

In hospitals and hospices, doctors and nurses care for infectious patients with only rubber gloves and cloth face masks between them and disease. But at IMMUNO the researchers insulate themselves from toes to fingers, from heart to head; in a ritual of awe in the face of horror, they assume the shape of monsters to even look upon the monstrosity they have created. They are trying to infect chimpanzees with the HIV/AIDS virus. Each of these social animals is isolated from the others by cement and steel.

Jane’s first visit to a medical research lab took place in March 1987, when she went to SEMA, in Rockville, Maryland, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). She’d already seen a film of what was inside. An animal rights group called True Friends had broken into the lab with a hand-held video camera to tape the feces-spattered floor, the frantically circling monkeys, the sound of flesh hitting metal as the chimps rocked in their tiny isolation chambers—22 by 22 by 24 inches. A three-year-old female, a toddler, screamed in terror. An older male, tattooed on the chest with the number 1164, mumbled silently to himself, expressionless, his lips slack. Images like these permeate Jane’s dreams. When she’s awake, they lap at the edge of her consciousness as the waves of Lake Tanganyika lick the shores of Gombe.

Using the film as a basis, Jane wrote an affidavit deploring the conditions. When the director of the lab dismissed her criticisms as based on second-hand information, she went to see for herself. She asked to be shown the little female who was filmed screaming. The youngster was taken out, she said, “to show all her screaming was not for real.”

Jane related this, crumpled in a chair by the curtained window of her room at the Mayflower Hotel on Central Park in New York City. It was the first time I had met her. She was exhausted from the morning’s taping of the “20-20” show; her jaw ached from recent dental work; and she did not yet know that she was coming down, again, with pneumonia. Her brown eyes looked distant, blank. “And it was far worse to see what did happen to her,” Jane told me quietly. “She was just lifted out by her keeper, she sat in his arms, and she was put back. There was no expression, no change, no fear, or pleasure at seeing her keeper. I shall be haunted forever by her eyes.”

———

“When Jane is in the States, there’s no release, ever,” Geza Teleki told me. “The world of chimpanzee promotion takes over. She has interviews at breakfast, and television interviews, and writing, and then a lecture, and then dinner. It’s a horrible schedule. She’s constantly inundated.”

In one fifty-two-day visit to the United States, she passed through fourteen cities, delivered twelve lectures, visited six zoos and one lab, organized a major conference for the next spring, and gave seven big press conferences, seven major TV interviews, two seminars, and five dinner talks. All this was done without the help of even one private secretary.

“We set up fifteen senators for her to talk to on one trip,” Geza continued. “Most people would take months to get an appointment with a senator. But we set this all up in two weeks. Because they want to talk to Jane Goodall. They want to hear stories about Flo.”

After her transformation, Jane read everything available on chimpanzees in medical labs. She became an expert on the AIDS virus and the intricacies of hepatitis vaccine—another major use for lab chimps is in testing this vaccine, since they are the only animal besides man whose bodies can host the virus. Three years before she knew nothing of any of this. Today she is an expert on virology, she can tell you the estimated number of chimps remaining in any African country, and she can quote chapter and verse from any law on the books dealing with animal welfare.

But this is not why she is so welcome in senators’ offices when she comes to ask them a favor. This is not why 54,000 Americans wrote to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in support of the petition to upgrade chimps’ status to endangered in 1988—the most public participation in an endangered species issue ever. Her crusade is effective because she is a master storyteller, and the characters in her stories are so powerful and so real that they can move an audience to tears.

While politicians and biomedical researchers debate standards for “animal technicians” and how to “manage important breeding resources,” Jane speaks from another perspective. People listen to her because she is talking about individuals: chimps with histories and motives, who have fantasies and dreams, who mourn their dead and enjoy a good joke.

Mary Smith, Jane’s friend and editor at National Geographic, called it “star quality”: her terrific grace, her self-assurance, her soothing English voice.

Of course, Biruté and Dian told wonderful stories, too. Their study animals—Supinah and Digit, Ralph and Uncle Bert, Siswoyo and Macho, are individuals as steeped in character as Flo and Fifi and David Graybeard. But perhaps the reason that Jane’s stories move us the most is that her stories are so intertwined with our own.

Jane’s own family drama unfolded along with the chimps’: on National Geographic specials, we watched the infant Flint take his first uncertain steps right along with Jane’s toddling son, Grub. Dian lived out her lone life on the mountain; Biruté chose a life in Indonesia, forsaking Western custom and protocols. But Jane was always one of “us”: her Westernness stands out like a porcelain teacup on a rough-hewn tree stump. Hers was the story with the familiar, fairy-tale elements: the intrepid blonde marries a baron and produces a golden-haired son. Hers was the choice we felt was most comfortable and, well, respectable. It is the weight of her whole life, and her persona, that she brings to bear on the plight of chimpanzees jammed into tiny cages. Their fate, she tells us, is in our hands.

It is impossible for even her most vocal critics to lump Jane with the “humaniacs”—those animal rights activists who often come off sounding shrill and moralistic. Jane is too reasoned for that. She is attuned to medicine’s urgency in its quest to ease human suffering; after all, she lost her second husband to cancer and her mother’s life was hugely prolonged by a bioplasticized pig valve in her heart. “If you stopped all animal research now—bang—that would lead to extra human suffering,” she freely acknowledges. But she rejects any rationale that pits humans who have benefited from medical advances against the welfare of animals. “These are the people I want on my side,” she says. “They owe animals their lives, and they’re the very people, if you approach them right, who would push to get more money for the humane care of the animals who have given them their lives.”

And Jane knows how to approach these people. Her opponents’ statistics and abstractions crumple before the concrete, the immediate, the individual. Veterinarian Thomas Wolfle, formerly of the NIH, said it would cost too much to provide laboratory primates with the improvements—larger cages, comfortable bedding, compassionate care givers—that Jane suggests. Jane answered (with the voice of reason): “Look at your car. Look at your house. Look at your office, look at your administration building, look at the holidays you take—and then tell me that you want to deprive these animals, whom we use for our own good, of just a little bit more space, just a little bit more care and compassion.”

The Jane Goodall Institute organizes Jane’s grueling schedule. Incorporated in 1977, it was at first a rather loosely organized collection of friends and admirers, a sort of fan club. Today JGI, with more than 50,000 members, annual revenue of more than $17 million, and twenty international offices, is the center of a network of institutes in thirteen countries—a powerful force in promoting chimpanzee survival and welfare as well as supporting continuing primate studies around the world. The Institute’s Africa Programs support chimpanzee conservation projects in Tanzania, Uganda, Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, and Sierra Leone. Another program, Roots and Shoots, which encourages and supports students from preschool to college in projects that benefit at once people, animals, and the environment, operates in nearly one hundred countries.

But the institute has another, unstated purpose, too: to protect Jane. It seems that she has always inspired this emotion; in spite of her accomplishments, her poise before audiences, and her demonstrated physical stamina, she exudes an air of vulnerability: “I would always worry about her,” said Emelie Bergman-Riss, the sturdy and kind Dutch girl who in December 1972, at age twenty-two, became Gombe’s camp manager and worked there until July 1975. “Although I hardly ever see her now, I still have that feeling.” Even Dian Fossey, nearly crippled with emphysema and nearly bankrupt, felt this way about her famous colleague. After picking Jane up at a New York airport, Dian wrote to Vanne: “I felt as if I were picking up a poor, wounded pigeon.”

One reason people worry about Jane is her British reserve. “You never quite know: Is she sick? Is she tired? Does she have malaria?” said Emelie. “She never complains, and is a private person. Even if she becomes angry, she only becomes more quiet. She doesn’t confront you.”

There are other reasons to worry about Jane. For one thing, she doesn’t eat. (“You don’t want to be a guest in her house,” warns Geza. “She doesn’t eat and you don’t either. If you’re lucky, she might bring out a couple of boiled eggs for you after a couple of days.”) She also gets sick a lot. Though there are few mosquitoes at Gombe, when they do bite they almost invariably transmit malaria. Jane cannot count the number of times she’s had this disease. And, like the chimps, she often gets pneumonia.

Institute staff try to protect Jane, with a polite ferocity born of loyalty bordering on reverence. At least one and sometimes several institute members accompany her on all her lecture tours, staying in her hotel. (But seldom does a single staff member accompany her for a whole tour—“the long haul,” the staff call it. It’s simply too grueling. They switch off like a relay team. And though institute staffers are always excited at Jane’s arrival, after she leaves the country, often for a similar tour in Europe, everyone in the office is physically and emotionally spent. “It takes us about a week to recover from one of Jane’s visits,” confided Judy Johnson, the institute’s former executive director.)

Since the institute was founded, Jane’s public status has been elevated from celebrity to dignitary. In 2001, the World Movement for Nonviolence presented Jane with its prestigious Gandhi/King Award for Nonviolence; in 2002, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan appointed Jane a United Nations Messenger of Peace—joining an eclectic group including Nobel Laureate Elie Weisel, heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali, and actor-director Michael Douglas.

Heather McGiffin, a longtime friend, recalls a reception held before a lecture Jane was delivering at the Smithsonian. It was like a private gallery showing, with Jane as the prized artwork, held “for people who had money.”

The reception was held at the Castle, the Smithsonian’s original Gothic brownstone building. “It was very plush. They had one of their high-backed thronelike chairs set up for Jane. Two men were standing on either side of her to protect her. And Jane walks in with this evening gown on, up to here [above the throat] down to there [tips of wrists] and down to there [over the shoes]. She walks to this chair, sits down, looks around here, and now people are allowed to go up and say how much they adore her. It was almost weird.”

Jane’s fame has engendered some resentment among academic and conservation groups, which are forever scrambling for publicity and scarce research and conservation dollars. The director of one conservation organization points out: “Dian’s organization was named after an individual animal. Biruté’s is named after the species she studies. Jane’s organization is called the Jane Goodall Institute. Don’t you think that says something about her?”

Jane’s crusade has pitted her directly against many of her colleagues—researchers who study primates and disease in medical laboratories or who explore their psychology in experiments using punishments like electric shocks or sensory or social deprivation. She cites many of these studies in the second chapter of the Big Book, and researchers have quoted her work extensively in their own published papers. Once they were on the same side, fellow explorers in pursuit of human knowledge. But today Jane sneers at that kind of science, “Science with a capital S.”

Just when the Big Book, like a merit badge, had earned her the scientific credibility her popular articles lacked, Jane’s opponents began to portray her as antiscience. “What Goodall is opposed to,” says Frederick King, former director of the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta, “is keeping animals in cages. If you want to study diseases, you must have periods of time when they are kept in isolation.”

Jane needs no protection from these barbs; she says they only strengthen her resolve. The only thing that could really crush her is something neither her institute staff nor her mentors at National Geographic nor her closest friends or family can protect her from: the crusade that chose her. The enormity of her task stretches out before her like a yawning abyss.

“The feeling has been expressed that if Jane gets her way with chimps, that’s the thin edge of the wedge,” she told reporters gathered at a press conference. “Next, they say, she’s going to want to improve conditions for monkeys and dogs and all the other animals.

“You bet I do.”

It would be inaccurate to portray Jane’s life now as a joyless string of meetings, lectures, and plane rides. The human species may be arrogant, but Jane finds great joy in its individuals.

“She makes friends with every taxi driver, every bellman, every maid,” said Beverly Marker, a former institute staffer who has accompanied Jane on lecture tours. “And she always says, ‘Those are such wonderful people. George’s daughter just loves animals; so-and-so’s son is sick; that cab driver sure cheered up.’ ”

Her son is a source of delight. In My Life with the Chimpanzees, she wrote, “Suppose someone else asks me: What have you contributed to the world?” The first of her answers was, “Well, I have raised a wonderful son.”

When I met Grub at The Birches in 1989, I saw that was true. At 22, Grub was healthy, handsome, intelligent, and kind. And in middle age, when his father, Hugo, was disabled with emphysema, Grub cared for him until his death, at age 65, in 2002. Today Grub lives in the house next to Jane’s, with his wife and children in Dar Es Salaam. What parent could wish for more?

And there is Gombe to return to, waiting for her like a lover’s promise.

“In that environment, with the chimps around me, I find the spiritual strength to battle in the States.” She begins a National Geographic lecture with these words, like an incantation.

Each visit to Gombe is, for Jane, a family reunion. In the summer of 1988 her staff told her the chimps had been roaming to the north of their traditional range for the past three days. But her first day back she found them in the home valley, which takes its name and nourishment from Kakombe Stream, which Jane also drinks from. The chimps—the “big group,” headed by alpha male Goblin, whom Jane first met the day after his birth in 1964—were plucking ripe figs from the trees near the waterfall, hooting and barking with excitement.

As her subject for the day’s observations, Jane chose Fifi, the daughter of her beloved old Flo. Fifi, who as a youngster so loved babies she would try to steal them from their mothers’ arms, now has her wish fulfilled: she has proved as gentle and playful a mother to her own two daughters, five-year-old Flossi and nine-year-old Fanni, as the venerable old Flo was to her children.

Flossi is playing a chasing game with Tita, Patti’s young daughter. Fanni scraps with young Gimble, Melissa’s surviving twin. Darbie, who was orphaned in the pneumonia epidemic of 1987, grooms with the big, sterile female, Gigi. Goblin grooms Kidevu as Kidevu’s five-year-old son, Konrad, briefly suckles.

Soon Gigi comes to Jane’s side; Evered, an adult male, joins her. The two chimps groom each other until Evered sleeps. Gigi stretches out beside Jane and closes her eyes. Everything is perfect; the midday heat, filtering through the forest canopy, bathes an Eden of tranquility, peace, and trust.

But for Jane, there is no escape. The sound of flesh hitting metal in a laboratory half a world away drowns out the birdsong. Where there is soft earth, she sees cold steel. As she pauses in her note taking, the images before her blur.