Jane Goodall's 90th Birthday

Jane Goodall, born on 3 April 1934, London, England) is a British ethologist, who celebrates her 90^th birthday today. She is known for her exceptionally detailed and long-term research on the chimpanzees of Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania.

Goodall, who was interested in animal behaviour from an early age, left school at age 18. She worked as a secretary and as a film production assistant until she gained passage to Africa. Once there, Goodall began assisting palaeontologist and anthropologist Louis Leakey. Her association with Leakey led eventually to her establishment in June 1960 of a camp in the Gombe Stream Game Reserve (now a national park) so that she could observe the behaviour of chimpanzees in the region. In 1964 she married a Dutch photographer Baron Hugo van Lawick who had been sent in 1962 to Tanzania to film her work; the couple had a son in 1967 and later divorced. The University of Cambridge in 1965 awarded Goodall a Ph.D. in ethology; she was one of very few candidates to receive a Ph.D. without having first possessed an A.B. degree. After her divorce she married Derek Bryceson, who was then member of Tanzania’s parliament and director of the Tanzanian national park system. He helped establish Gombe Stream National Park before his untimely death of cancer in 1980.

Except for short periods of absence, Goodall remained in Gombe until 1975, often directing the fieldwork of other doctoral candidates. In 1977 she cofounded the Jane Goodall Institute for Wildlife Research, Education and Conservation (commonly called the Jane Goodall Institute) in California; the centre later moved its headquarters to the Washington, D.C., area. She also created various other initiatives, including Jane Goodall’s Roots & Shoots (1991), a youth service program.