“On the morning of July 14, 1960, she stepped onto a pebble beach along a remote stretch of the east shore of Lake Tanganyika…She had brought a tent, a few tin plates, a cup without a handle, a shoddy pair of binoculars, an African cook named Dominic, and — as a companion, at the insistence of people who feared for her safety in the wilds of pre-independence Tanganyika — her mother. She had come to study chimpanzees. Or anyway, to try.“
Fifty years after her studies began, pioneering primatologist Jane Goodall is honored (again) by National Geographic. “She created a research program, a set of protocols and ethics, an intellectual momentum — she created, in fact, a relationship between the scientific world and one community of chimpanzees — that has grown far beyond what one woman could do.”
She’s one of the great figures of the 20th century. (And 21st.)
I started writing “women of science” after “great figures,” then lopped off the “of science,” then realized I could do the same for “women.” No qualifiers needed.
And I didn’t mean “great figures” as a pun. But I could have. ~groucho eyebrow and cigar waggle~