Jane Goodall: A life in the field

As a girl in England, Jane Goodall had a toy chimpanzee named Jubilee — a harbinger of the primatologist she was to become and of the jubilant audiences that greet her at every turn in adulthood.

Beginning in 1960, her groundbreaking studies of chimpanzees in the African wild led to a series of revelations that revolutionized the scientific understanding of these close human relatives.

Goodall, a onetime secretary who skipped past a bachelor's degree to do a doctorate in ethnology at the University of Cambridge, famously discovered that chimpanzees make and use tools, thrive in socially complex families, and even engage in warfare.

In her first year at what was then the Gombe Stream National Reserve in Tanzania, Goodall also observed that chimpanzees — thought to be vegetarians — supplemented their diet by eating bush pigs, rodents, and insects.

The iconic biologist — now 72 and perhaps the most famous woman scientist in the world — was at Harvard Sunday (March 18) to accept the Roger Tory Peterson Memorial medal, awarded annually since 1997 to world-shaking conservationists by the Harvard Museum of Natural History.