Jane Goodall, whose full name is Jane Van Lawick-Goodall, was born in 1934 in London. She is an ethologist, which is a scientist who studies the origins, histories, and customs of peoples. She is also an authority on wild chimpanzees. In 1957 Goodall approached the anthropologist Louis Leakey, asking for a job which would allow her to get closer to animals. Leakey hired her, originally as his secretary. After taking her with him to Olduvai Gorge, Leakey asked her to study the 160 chimpanzees of the Gombe Stream Reserve on the eastern shores of Lake Tanganyika. Very little prior research had been done on chimpanzees, so Leakey wanted someone to do a long-term study on them in great detail.

Goodall received her initial training at the Royal Free Hospital and the London Zoo before setting up camp at Gombe in 1970. She has remained there ever since, and under her direction Gombe has become a world-famous and much-respected research center. With her husband, the Dutch wildlife photographer Hugo Van Lawick, she wrote two popular books. Her first book, "In the Shadow of Man" (1971), allowed her expansive knowledge of chimpanzees to be shared with the world. This book presented a rather idealized idea of chimpanzee society. They were shown as mainly vegetarian, peaceful and social. This book was also the first to report that chimpanzees were toolmakers, using blades of grass to extract termites from their nests. In the same year, she wrote "Innocent Killers" a book about spotted hyenas, which had also been previously unresearched. Goodall also collaborated with her husband in several films which brought her work into the view of the public.

The book Goodall wrote in 1990, "Through a Window," portrayed chimpanzees in a different way than her earlier work. Goodall discovered that when the chimpanzees were split into different groups, the groups would attack and kill one another for domination. She also found that the chimpanzees were not mainly vegetarian, but that they hunted monkeys, baboon infants, bushpig, bushbuck, and other small mammals. Goodall also witnessed incidents of cannibalism.

Recently, Goodall has campaigned for the conservation of chimpanzees in the wild and for better treatment for those in zoos and research centers. She has set up the Jane Goodall Institute for Research Education and Conservation with centers in the United States, Canada, and Britain. Through her long devotion to the study of chimpanzees, Jane Goodall has given the world a portrait of their society.