Jane Goodall’s speech marking the 50th anniversary of her continuous chimpanzee research was held at the KAIST Auditorium on September 28. The presentation provided valuable insight and illustrated some personal experiences on her lifelong journey with chimpanzees, provided with simultaneous translation by Professor Jae Chun Choe of Ehwa Womans University.

Jane Goodall is a renowned British primatologist and anthropologist, considered to be the world’s foremost expert on chimpanzees. She is best known for her fifty years’ study on social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania. She is the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and has worked extensively on conservation and animal welfare issues.

The renowned primate researcher covered subjects from personal experiences and ongoing projects at Gombe National Park to animal research being conducted by collaborating biologists from around the world. She also showed concerns with environmental damage caused by modern society and shared her optimistic visions about future generations.

The speech presented her past and ongoing progress with research at Gombe National Park in Tanzania, where she first set foot five decades ago. She explained to the audience previous discoveries that shattered the conventional academic view of animal behavior studies in Gombe. Experiences from other animal researchers were told about how primates have human-like behavior thatonly humans were thought to possess. She showed how chimpanzees are an ambassador of all species of animals on this planet to mankind, due to their similarities with the human species.

The speech dealt with concerns about the environmental damage caused by human society that she had personally encountered around the world. Such encounters included previously unseen melting glaciers in Greenland to sinking islands near Panama that are endangering natives living on them. She emphasized how mankind is the most intellectually capable species on Earth, and has the ability to protect all of the species on the planet. However, she expressed that modern human society is only concerned with immediate profits, and that a more serious consideration of the survival of future generations must be made.