As a child, Jane Goodall dreamed of going to Africa to live with wild animals.
Her love of animals was plain to see, but few people could have imagined where it would take her.
During her childhood, Goodall brought many kinds of animals home.
When she was 18 months old, she brought some earthworms into the house and wanted to keep them as pets in her bed.
She released them only when her mother pointed out that they need to be in the earth to live.
Her curiosity about the natural world was limitless.
At age four, while the family was staying at a farm, she went missing for an afternoon.
Worried, her mother called the police, but Goodall eventually turned up, explaining excitedly that she had hidden in the hen house to see an egg being laid.
Goodall's curiosity shaped her destiny:
she became a world-famous primatologist whose discoveries have changed the way humans see the natural world.
Goodall was born in London, England, on April 3, 1934, and grew up in the town of Bournemouth on the southern coast of England.
Her father, Mortimer, was a race-car driver, and her mother, Vanne, was a writer.
Goodall enjoyed backyard expeditions such as capturing insects or digging up worms, and then running to show her mother each discovery.
Her parents encouraged her, and Mortimer started her lifelong love of primates when he gave Goodall a toy chimpanzee for her second birthday.
By the age of eight, Goodall had vowed to go to Africa.
Her mother supported her, saying, "Jane, if you really want something, and if you work hard, take advantage of the opportunities and never give up, you will somehow find a way."
Goodall's passion for animals deepened when she met Rusty, a black mixed-breed dog who belonged to the owner of a local hotel.
Goodall played with Rusty and taught him tricks, writing in her 1999 book Reason for Hope that Rusty "made it abundantly clear that animals had personalities, could reason and solve problems, had minds, had emotions." Reason for Hope
After completing high school, Goodall had no money for college and little hope of going to Africa.
After her mother told her that secretaries could get jobs anywhere in the world, Goodall entered secretarial school and found work soon after graduating.
Then, in 1955, she received an invitation to visit a school friend in Kenya, Africa.
In March 1957, after working for two years as a secretary and then waitress to pay for the trip, Goodall sailed to Africa.
In Kenya, her friend told her she should meet Louis Leakey, a famous anthropologist who was researching human evolution.
By examining the fossils of distant human relatives, Leakey was trying to prove that humans and primates share common ancestors.
When Goodall visited Leakey at the museum he ran, he asked her questions about the animals featured in the exhibits.
Although she had no college education, the self-taught Goodall answered his questions well.
Leakey, impressed, hired her as his secretary.
A few months later, Leakey asked Goodall, now 24 years old, to study a group of chimpanzees living in Tanzania.
She happily agreed, but soon learned that the African government would not permit a young woman to travel alone in the wilderness.
Goodall's mother came to her rescue, writing to friends, "I shall never know why I suddenly . . . heard myself say how much I should like to go to Gombe."
In July 1960, the two women set up camp at the Gombe Stream Game Reserve in Tanzania.
From Gombe, Goodall wrote to her family, "It is the Africa of my childhood's dreams, and I have the chance of finding out things which no one has ever known before."
Although the chimpanzees would not allow her near them for the first few months, Goodall was patient.
They soon grew accustomed to her, and she to them.
As she began to recognize individual chimps, she gave them names.
She called one male chimp David Greybeard. Soon, Goodall began to make discoveries about the chimpanzees.
She found that, like humans, with whom they share 98 percent of their genes, chimpanzees communicate and have family relationships.
She saw them hunting for meat, which contradicted the common belief that they were mostly vegetarian.
Her most famous discovery came that fall, when Goodall saw David Greybeard using a stalk of grass to fish termites, a favorite snack, out of their mound.
Until that moment, scientists believed that one of the things that defined humans and distinguished them from all other animal species was their ability to make and use tools.
But the chimps' use of tools revealed that humans were not the only intelligent creatures on earth.
And if chimps could use tools, what other human qualities did they share?
Goodall's love of animals had carried her deep into Africa and allowed her to make many discoveries, but she was not a trained scientist.
Leakey told her that if she wanted to continue her research, she would have to go back to school.
In 1962, Goodall returned to England and entered Cambridge University.
There, she faced criticism from scientists who challenged her research methods.
They argued that Goodall's practice of identifying the chimps by names instead of numbers showed affection for them, and her feelings could make it impossible for her to be objective about their behavior.
Others said that the emotions Goodall claimed to see in the chimps—such as joy, sadness, or jealousy—could never be verified.
Undaunted, Goodall completed her Ph.D. and returned to Africa to study the chimpanzees for another decade.
In 1967, she married and had a son.
Although she still spent time with the chimps, Goodall hired students to carry on the day-to-day work at Gombe.
She began to write about the chimpanzees, completing her first book, In the Shadow of Man, in 1971. In the Shadow of Man
In 1986, Harvard University published Goodall's The Chimpanzees of Gombe:
Patterns of Behavior to wide acclaim, and she was recognized as one of the world's foremost primate experts. The Chimpanzees of Gombe
By 1980, Goodall had begun to travel around the world, speaking about the chimpanzees of Gombe and their habitat.
People were finally starting to understand humankind's impact on the environment; many animal species were on the verge of extinction, and natural resources were being spent faster than they could be renewed.
Goodall realized that humans were the only animals capable of destroying the very planet that sustained them.
She believed that people everywhere would have to work together to protect the planet for all living things.
Her tireless work on behalf of animals, humans, and the environment prompted the Secretary General of the United Nations to name her a Messenger of Peace in 2002.
Today, Jane Goodall continues to share her ideas about how to preserve and improve the world for all its inhabitants.
The Jane Goodall Institute for Wildlife Research, Education and Conservation, founded in 1971, strives to protect animals and nurture the environment.
Goodall's Roots & Shoots organization offers a youth program with more than eight thousand groups in nearly one hundred countries.
Through Roots & Shoots, young people learn ways to better the world by completing projects that promote care and concern for animals, the environment, and the human community.
"Everybody must remember that every one of us makes a difference, and we have a choice," said Goodall in a May 2008 interview.
Fifty years after she met David Greybeard in the African wilderness, Goodall points to four things that give her hope for the future—the human brain, the human spirit, the determination of young people, and the resilience of nature.
