Episode 03: Jane Goodall
Origin Stories
Meredith Johnson
4.8 • 554 Ratings
🗓️ 30 June 2015
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dr. Jane Goodall is a legend. She is a science hero, a trailblazing researcher who inspires people around the world. In this episode, Jane Goodall shares part of the story of how she went from working as a secretary to becoming the world's leading expert on chimpanzee behavior.
In 2004, author and Leakey family biographer Virginia Morrell interviewed Jane Goodall for the Louis Leakey Centennial Oral History Project. This never before heard recording covers the time in Goodall's life from 1957 when she arrived in Nairobi, Kenya, to November 1960 when she made her first groundbreaking discovery, one that changed the way we see chimpanzees as well as the way we define ourselves as humans.
Links
- The Jane Goodall Institute
- The Leakey Foundation
- ROHO. The Regional Oral History Office of the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley
- Virginia Morrell
Credits
This episode was produced by Meredith Johnson and edited by Audrey Quinn, production help from Schuyler Swenson. Scoring and composition by Henry Nagle. Additional Music from the Blue Dot Sessions and Lee Rosevere.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Origin Stories, the Leakey Foundation podcast. |
| 0:09.0 | I'm Meredith Johnson. |
| 0:11.0 | Today we're going to hear the story of one of the most famous women in science, Jane Goodall. |
| 0:16.0 | But we pick things up with Lewis Leakey, the paleoanthropologist, recorded here in 1970. |
| 0:21.6 | Okay, rolling. |
| 0:23.6 | Okay. |
| 0:24.6 | Leakey special, roll one, one take one. |
| 0:27.6 | Dr. Leakey, could you explain to us the importance of the study of primate behavior to contemporary man? |
| 0:39.2 | Yes, it's very easy, really, and especially the higher primates. |
| 0:43.2 | You see, today there are living three of the higher primates, chimpanzees, gorillas, and |
| 0:49.7 | orangutang, and they are our closest living cousins, and as our nearest cousins they must be in a |
| 0:57.4 | position to throw some light on my problem I'm concerned with a study of early man and proto |
| 1:05.1 | man and it was because of that that I looked around to find somebody first of all study, study the chimpanzees. And so I invited Jane, |
| 1:14.4 | who showed with me today, to study the chimpanzees in depth down in place in Tanzania, and warned her |
| 1:23.2 | very carefully indeed that it was going to be a very long job. A very long job. |
| 1:29.2 | July 14, 2015 marks the 55th anniversary of the day that Jane Goodall first arrived |
| 1:34.5 | at the Gombe Stream Game Reserve in Tanzania to start her life's work. |
| 1:39.2 | Today, Jane Goodall is a hero in science classrooms everywhere. |
| 1:43.3 | The woman who showed us the amazing |
| 1:44.8 | world of chimpanzees and changed the way we defined ourselves as humans. |
| 1:50.3 | In our episode today, we're going back in time to the late 1950s when we knew practically |
| 1:54.6 | nothing about the lives of wild chimps. We didn't even know how closely related we are |
... |
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