Jane Goodall

For one thing, I gave them names instead of numbers.

Terrible thing to do.

For another thing, the first scientific paper I wrote, I talked about chimpanzees as he and she, and I said, this individual who, and the article came back, and it was substituted for he and she, and which was substituted for who.

And then in those days, you couldn't talk about something like adolescence and childhood.

You couldn't talk about motivation.

You couldn't talk about excitement.

There was very, very little you could do in terms of describing chimpanzee behavior in terms that ordinary people would understand.

I think that in most scientific circles today, these things that I've mentioned are accepted.

I think people have come to realize that when we're talking about creatures who share over 98% of their genetic material with us, creatures whom we know to have very, very similar central nervous systems and brains,

You know, it's completely crazy to imagine that they wouldn't have similar feelings, similar ways of tackling problems in life.

Mostly people accept today that that is so.

Really until quite recently, there hasn't been that obvious a difference in the way they treat or they treated male and female researchers.

But we now have one chimpanzee who's a rogue and he's actually very dangerous to female researchers and most particularly to me.

And it's very sad, after 32 years in the field, that one chimpanzee has, in a way, made Gombe feel a little unsafe to me today.

What does he do that's a threat to you?

He's probably ten times stronger than I am.

I mean, a big male chimp is said to be four to five times stronger than an adult human male.

And Frodo is the largest, heaviest chimp we've ever known at Gombe.

He's 115 pounds.

He's about 20 years old.