by Ira Flatow
Besides being ridiculed at Cambridge, Goodall found that her scientific methods and integrity were challenged. “I was even accused of teaching the chimps how to fish for termites, which would have been such a brilliant coup.
“So, the Geographic came in and provided money, and then my late ex-husband was sent out by Geographic, and he got this amazing film, some of which has been blown up for the IMAX, and it’s just amazing that the film he took in 1961 has been blown up onto this huge screen. Actually, it’s very moving for me to see that. I feel I’m back.”
My own earliest memories of Leakey and Goodall were shaped by what I watched on television in the 1950s and 1960s, the National Geographic specials. Goodall believes that to be true for many people. “Whole generations of people saw and were moved by those and got fascinated. And, you know, literally thousands of people have said, ‘I’m doing what I do because I grew up with you.’”
David Greybeard, the toolmaking chimp, died from pneumonia in 1958 at the age of around 35, not very old for a chimp. Thinking back to the patience and empathy she showed her chimps, I wondered aloud whether she thought that a primatologist’s sex influences how they conduct their work.
“I think, in many cases, it actually does. Louis Leakey always thought women were better as observers. He felt that they were more patient, and certainly it’s very often true that women tend to be a bit quieter and more prepared to sit there and let the animal—whatever animal is being studied—tell you things. And it’s getting more difficult today because students go out and they have a hypothesis and they’ve got to prove or disprove it. But in the days when I went out, nobody knew anything, so you just went out there, and everything was new and everything was exciting. It was a tremendous privilege really to be there then.
“And I think that women have a couple of things going for them through evolution. Good mothers had to be patient; otherwise they didn’t raise a sufficient number of kids. So if patience can be innate, then the female is likely to have a larger portion of it. And secondly, women have had to be able to very quickly understand the wants and needs of nonverbal beings. That’s their own kids. So that too might be helpful when you’re trying to learn about another species. And finally, women have traditionally played a role of just being in the family and watching very carefully to see what the relationships are so that [they] can prevent discord within a family before it actually happens.”
But can’t males share these traits as well?
“Of course males can have them, and there are some absolutely amazing male field study–men doing wonderful field studies. It’s just that women seem to be a little more gentle about it.”
Scientists like to be surprised. That’s why they are in the business they are—to discover the unknown. Goodall was certainly surprised to learn of the toolmaking abilities of our nearest cousins. But an even greater surprise awaited her years later.
“The most surprising and shocking really was when, in 1970—that’s after ten years of research—we realized that chimpanzees have a dark side, just like us. I thought they were so like us, but rather nicer. And then to find that they are capable of brutality, that they may even have a series of events not unlike primitive warfare, that they can attack members of another social group so severely that those individuals die as a result of their wounds, and that infants can be killed. And that was very, very shocking.”
Why did it take 10 years to discover that?
“Because the boundary patrols are right out at the far end of their range, and I suppose we just weren’t following them far enough. But also the war—we called it the four-year war—was a rather specific circumstance. Our main study community divided and the smaller half took up a portion of the range, which they had previously all shared. And when those two groups had separated, the males of the larger group began to systematically annihilate the split-off individuals. It was almost like a civil war. And it was very, very shocking.”
It almost sounds like it was a preplanned, well-thought-out tactic. “Certainly, when they’re moving out to the peripheral part of their range, it seems to be planned. Like, one or two males will set off and they’ll look back, and very soon, the entire group knows exactly what’s happening at that point. The females and young ones usually stop, and they don’t go on with the big males.”
Goodall gave up real field research in the late 1980s and since then has been in the forefront of animal rights work.
“I was very shocked at a conference in Chicago to see secretly filmed footage of chimpanzees in a medical research lab in cages that were five foot by five foot and totally bleak and barren, isolated, these highly social beings who are so like us in so many ways. And that was really what took me out as an advocate, took me away from pure research, because I felt I owed it to the chimps. They’d taught me so much, they’d given me so much. They really helped to blur the line that people saw as so sharp dividing us from the rest of the animal kingdom. And once that line is seen as blurred, once you’re prepared to admit that we’re not the only beings with personalities, minds, and feelings, then you have a new respect not only for the chimps, the other great apes, but [also for] other amazing sentient, sapient beings with whom we share the planet.”
After decades of watching animals in the wild showing more intelligence than we give them credit for, Goodall has strong feelings about animals used in research. “It was very unfortunate that there was this feeling that it’s fine to do anything to an animal, as long as maybe it’s for human good instead of saying, as most scientists will, ‘Unfortunately, we’ll always need some animals.’ We’ve already got alternatives to those. And so I want a mind-set that says it’s not really ethical to do this to animals, so let’s get together as soon as we can and find ways to do it without using animals. Because, you know, our brains are so amazing. We can do so much.”
I wanted to know from Dr. Goodall what was left to be discovered. Were there perhaps any undiscovered large ape species? I was unprepared for her answer.
“You’re talking about Yeti or Bigfoot or Sasquatch. You’ll be amazed when I tell you that I’m sure that they exist. I’ve talked to so many Native Americans who’ve all described the same sounds, two who’ve seen them. I’ve probably got about thirty books that have come from different parts of the world, from China, from all over the place. There was a little tiny snippet in the newspaper which says that British scientists have found what they believe to be a Yeti hair, and that the scientists in the Natural History Museum in London couldn’t identify it as any known animal.”
In this age of DNA analysis, Goodall is hoping that living cells might exist on the sample. “There will be. And I’m sure that’s what they’ve examined and they don’t match up.” Goodall remains hopeful and confident that if this sample does not yield viable DNA, someday a hair sample will be found and prove that Bigfoot really does exist, a belief she has carried for years.
“I’m a romantic, so I always wanted them to exist. There are people looking. There’s a very ardent group in Russia, and they have published a whole lot of stuff about what they’ve seen. Of course, the big criticism of all this is where is the body? You know, why isn’t there a body? And I can’t answer that. And maybe they don’t exist, but I want them to.”
Besides its use in finding Yeti, Goodall says DNA technology has changed primate research.
“That’s been very exciting because the one thing we never knew for sure, although sometimes we could guess, is which male fathered which infant. And with DNA profiling techniques, which can now be done from fecal samples—you don’t even need hairs—we now are beginning to identify the fathers. That means that we can look at the relationship between a particular adult male and an infant and find out if there’s any special behaviors which seem to indicate that in some way they know. Now we don’t know yet, but it’s fascinating. Sometimes our guess is absolutely confirmed. We found an example of incest, which is very rare. So it’s a fascinating new field for us.
/> “One of the most fascinating areas for research is cultural differences between different populations across Africa or even different neighboring communities. And of course, it’s still controversial as to whether chimpanzees can have culture, but I define it very simply as behavior that’s passed from one generation to the next through observation, imitation, and practice. And tool-using behaviors differ quite markedly across the species range in Africa. Sometimes it’s due to different environments, but very often it seems to be due to the young ones seeing what the older ones do.
“Now we’ve just begun to skim the surface of these differences, but even as you and I are speaking, chimpanzees, along with their cultures, are being wiped out right across Africa. From about two million a hundred years ago, to the very maximum two hundred thousand today. And that’s more likely to be one hundred fifty thousand spread over twenty-one countries, mostly in tiny, isolated fragments where there’s no possibility for long-term survival because the gene pools aren’t big enough.”
And they’re dying out why?
“They’re dying because of habitat destruction, as human populations grow. They’re caught in wire snares set for other animals, but they catch the chimps and gorillas, for that matter, and they either die of gangrene or lose a hand or foot and can’t compete very well reproductively. But the worst threat for chimps today is the commercial bush meat trade, and that is the hunting of animals for sale in the big towns. Not subsistence hunting, which has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years, but this has happened because the logging companies have made roads into the heart of the last great forests of the Congo Basin. Hunters go along the trail, they now have transport, they shoot everything, they load it on the truck, they take it to the towns, where the elite will pay more for it than chicken or goat.
“And it’s not sustainable at all. And it gets worse because you’ve got your logging camps, two thousand people or more, the loggers and their families, who weren’t there before. And now the Pygmies, the indigenous people, are paid and given weapons and ammunition to shoot for the logging camps, and that’s not sustainable either. The logging camp moves, the Pygmies have had it. They’ve lost their culture. They may have trees standing from sustainable logging, but they’ll be dead forests.”
Don’t the indigenous peoples understand the cycle? “There’s nothing they can say about it. They don’t want the loggers to come in any more than the people in Ecuador want the oil pipelines to come in, but what can they do when big-business interests are put before the interests of the people living there?”
So it’s just a short time before we lose the chimps. “We’re working very hard to do something about it. The United States government, through the State Department, has put quite a large sum of money into a Congo Basin project. And best of all, President Bongo of Gabon, which has the largest area of unlogged forests, has just taken twelve areas away from logging concessions.”
Goodall is also worried about the state of the environment closer to home. She says that the fight against terrorism is threatening to overshadow environmental concerns in the United States. “Well, it has. It does. Look at the drilling for oil in the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge. It was blocked, but now probably it’s going to be going ahead although in somewhat modified form. But directly after the eleventh of September [2001], it was very clear to me as I traveled around the country that people were reluctant to admit that they cared about the environment in case they would seem unpatriotic. And fortunately, gradually, people are coming out of that mind-set because, you know, if we let the planet continue to deteriorate, we really are in a very, very bad state. And if we continue to let that happen, then the terrorists finally will win, because for our great-grandchildren there will be nothing left.”
Celebrities tend to get noticed; they draw the media. So does Jane Goodall now see herself as an effective spokesperson for the environment?
“I do spend a lot of time talking to young people, but also people from all walks of life and all ages. And one of the remarks that’s so often said to me after a lecture, people come up and they say, ‘You have reinspired me to do my bit. You have made me feel that my own life is more worthwhile. I feel that I’ve been just sitting doing nothing. Now I want to do what I can.’ So until there’s a groundswell of people prepared to accept the tough decisions that may affect their purse to some extent, then we’ll never get the right legislation.
“I do know that when talking to people who perhaps think very differently, the only chance you have of getting them to think in a different way is to touch the heart. And if you’re strident, if you start accusing people, if you point fingers, then you immediately see the eyes glaze over and you know that you’re not getting across. I think that so much of what goes on that, in my view anyway, is a mistake is due not to any kind of criminal intent but simply because people honestly haven’t understood. So I feel that that’s my job. My job is to help people understand and to think about the future. I mean, just imagine what this world would be like if we went back to the old tradition of the Native Americans, who said every major decision has to be made with the question ‘How will this affect our people seven generations on?’ [in mind]. Even if we could just say two generations on, even one generation on, it would be helpful.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
IAN WILMUT: DOLLY PLUS TEN
Meat and milk from clones of adult cattle, pigs and goats, and their offspring, are as safe to eat as food from conventionally bred animals.
—U.S. FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION, DRAFT REPORT, DECEMBER 2006
In 1996, a fetching newborn lamb named Dolly made headlines and magazine covers around the world. She looked nothing like the ewe that gave birth to her, because Dolly was the first animal cloned from an adult cell.
Dolly went on to mate and give birth to six healthy lambs. Though she suffered from illnesses, such as arthritis and lung disease, normally associated with much older sheep, she was such an amazing accomplishment that when she died in 2003, many people around the world who had never seen her in person felt that loss.
Today, of course, animal cloning is almost common. But Dolly’s creation triggered fiery debates over human cloning that are still very much alive.
Ian Wilmut is an embryologist and professor of reproductive science at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He was a member of the team at Scotland’s Roslin Institute that cloned Dolly back in 1996. He is opposed to cloning human babies, but he says he’s a passionate advocate of what he calls a restricted form of human cloning.
“It’s amazing to think that it’s already more than a decade ago that she was born. And a lot has happened, but I think there’s a lot still to come. Using this technology to try to understand human disease, to develop new treatments for them.” That’s one of the immediate benefits, says Wilmut. Looking farther into the future, perhaps “being able to use it to stop the birth of children with inherited disease. I think there are a lot of things which I would encourage people to think about and to be optimistic about this technology and what it can offer.”
Now that scientists have successfully cloned a variety of animals, people are beginning to talk about the possibility of cloning people. After all, it’s not unreasonable to expect that parents might desire to have a clone of a deceased young child, tragically lost to them. But Wilmut remains cautious.
“The application that I’ve never supported is the idea of producing somebody who is a genetically identical twin of a person who is here. To me, it would be acceptable to produce embryos from which you could get cells and to produce a baby in which you had corrected a genetic disease. But it would not be a clone of somebody who was here already. It would be, if you like, a clone of an embryo. And it’s being done for a different purpose. So it’s very important all the time to say exactly what you have in mind.”
Is it possible that there might be a rogue scientist somewhere in the world who might attempt to clone a human being? Some have claimed to be able to do so�
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“I think it is extraordinarily unlikely. The people who’ve talked about this in the past have been advertising themselves but actually not doing anything. And I think this is a fear which is greatly exaggerated.”
Would it be possible to create a united, international front against cloning people?
“I think that would be preferable. But given the different cultural histories, it may not be easy to achieve it. And so I’d be quite content to see each country preparing its own regulations. And it is, of course, very disappointing that [the United States] hasn’t done it. The United Kingdom, where I work, has some of the most liberal approaches to this. But it is very tightly regulated, which I think is entirely appropriate.”
But how can regulation stop someone with the knowledge and tools who desires to ignore the boundaries of accepted behavior? Wilmut doesn’t believe it inevitable that some scientist will create a human clone. “No. It might happen. But I think it depends on how we behave. It is, of course, possible for societies to come to different conclusions. But a perception that we should have is that there are disadvantages to most technologies. What’s key all the time is for societies to discuss things, to be informed about, and then to prepare regulations.”
EXPECTING TOO MUCH
Sometimes, technologies are oversold—that is, when they first break into the news, we hype them as saviors, as disease cures to the point that when they don’t produce results quickly enough, we think of them as failures. Has cloning been overhyped?