Just last year, Jane Goodall was in Mumbai. At 90, she looked remarkably energetic, dressed simply in a green shirt and trousers, smiling as she moved through the exhibit of her work at the Museum of Solutions (MuSo) in Lower Parel.
She met groups of schoolchildren and regaled them with stories of her time in the jungles of Gombe, where she first watched chimpanzees use tools and mourn their dead. But her visit wasn’t just a trip down memory lane. She spoke with urgency about the “dire need” for environmental and wildlife conservation in India, the role of young people in leading those efforts, and the responsibility of the media in spreading the message far and wide.
Goodall, who boasts a massive following, has been an inspiration to many not only as a scientist who changed how we see the natural world, but also as someone who challenged prevailing norms and carved her own path. The story of how she became a scientist, despite never having set foot in a university classroom, is an absolute inspiration to millions of young kids who are passionate about the wild and wilderness.
A rebel among scholars, Goodall walked into Cambridge at the age of 28, not as a student of biology or zoology but as a waitress who turned into a secretary and later a researcher with notebooks filled with observations from Tanzania. She skipped the undergraduate and even the master’s stages, enrolling directly in a PhD in ethology. It was almost unheard of.
At the time, she had already spent two years in the forests of Tanzania observing chimpanzees under the mentorship of famed palaeontologist Louis Leakey.
Her professors were sceptical. They frowned at her naming chimpanzees instead of numbering them and her insistence on writing about their personalities and emotions. But Goodall stood her ground. “I had seen it with my own eyes,” she would later recall. “You can’t tell me it isn’t real.” Her findings — chimps making tools, showing grief, engaging in complex social relationships — showed a side to animals that was far from the dogmatic instruction that established clear boundaries between humans and animals.
Cambridge had to recognise that a young woman without formal qualifications had brought the field of primatology into being. In an era when formal degrees and peer-reviewed publications dominate, her story is a validation of how sincere passion can get you institutional approval and reckoning. Goodall’s life insists that scientific knowledge must remain open to insights from those outside classrooms as well, be it citizen scientists, indigenous communities, or activists.
Goodall’s patient observation, empathy, and refusal to reduce animals to numbers were dismissed partly because of who she was - a young woman without a pedigree in a male-dominated discipline. Yet, her knowledge and observation were difficult to ignore or dismiss. She observed chimps fashioning sticks into tools to fish for termites, an act previously believed to be uniquely human.
Goodall’s outsider status was also shaped by class. She was not the product of elite British schools. She had worked as a secretary to fund her African trip.
Beyond chimpanzees: Broadening the scientific lens
Her visit to Mumbai reminded us that Goodall’s work was never only about chimpanzees. It was about broadening the lens of science, about including empathy, ethics, and storytelling in the pursuit of knowledge.
When she urged Indian schoolchildren to take charge of conservation, she was also quietly restating the lesson of her own life that no one should be excluded from the work of discovery simply because they don’t fit the mould.
Jane Goodall showed that knowledge belongs to those who are curious enough to look closely, patient enough to wait, and bold enough to believe what they see — even if the world tells them otherwise.
Her name will always be linked with the chimpanzees of Gombe, but her real legacy may lie just as much in the way she unsettled science itself, especially when she attributed empathy to animals. Her patient, empathetic style of research was dismissed as “too soft,” but decades later, her recognition of animal subjectivity is considered foundational.
THE WEEK was also present at the scientist's inaugural address at the CSMVS Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sanghralaya in Mumbai and one line from her speech will always ring true: "Don't stop to question; don't stop to love nature. Walk into the woods whenever you can and you'll find the true meaning of existence."
Goodall, who remains one of the very few people in modern academia to earn a doctorate without first passing through the rituals of undergraduate life, will keep inspiring generations after generations for her work, her thoughts and her actions.