Jane Goodall

The name most people meet first through a clip about chimpanzees belongs to a primatologist and environmentalist whose work changed the questions researchers asked. Rather than settling debates within an existing frame, she reframed the central problems of chimpanzee study and of conservation ethics — what we owe to animals, and on what grounds.

She was born in London in 1934 and built her working method around disciplined reflection and careful explanation. Her early research paired conceptual rigour with an unusual attention to how ideas were expressed. Her mid-career writing took on wider ground, moving into historical, social and technical complications that the earlier work had not needed to address. Disagreement did not slow this down; argument with her critics tended to force sharper, more exact statements of what she actually meant.

By her later years she had become a point of reference for others, holding together new thinking and long-standing commitments. She died on 1 October 2025. What remains is less an archive of findings than a way of asking questions — which is why her material still gets quoted by people who never studied a chimpanzee in their lives.