You did everything wrong.
That was the message Jane Goodall got from her professors at Cambridge University where she enrolled for her Ph.D. after she began her ground-breaking study of chimpanzees in Tanzania's Gombe National Park.
"I was told I did it all wrong," Goodall, 76, said. "I shouldn't have given the chimpanzees names, I should have given them numbers. I shouldn't talk about them having personalities," or feelings, or thoughts; these, her teachers said, were only experienced by man.
Five decades later, Goodall has been vindicated and mainstream science understands what she knew all along, and what she said her childhood dog had taught her: "Of course animals have minds and thoughts and feelings."
Goodall spoke recently at Western Connecticut State University's O'Neill Center in front of a near capacity crowd. The title of her talk, which lasted more than an hour, was "Gombe and Beyond: The Next 50 Years." The speech commemorated the 50th anniversary of the start of her research on chimpanzees in Gombe.
The research Goodall started in Gombe continues to be conducted today, and is the longest continuous study of a group of chimpanzees. "Looking back over 50 years is an extraordinary experience," she said.
When Goodall started, no one knew just how alike humans and chimpanzees were.
"We didn't know how similar the anatomy of the human brain was," and that you can get a "blood transfusion if you match the blood of a chimpanzee," and that chimps have a sense of humor and "are capable of rational thought and reasoned thought."
Today Goodall said GPS technology and satellite imagery are aiding greatly in the study of chimpanzees.
"In every chimpanzee group that is being studied there is a different tool-using technique," which is evidence that chimps pass down knowledge from generation to generation, she added.
Goodall said ever since she read about Dr. Doolittle and Tarzan, as a young girl, studying animals in the wild was a dream of hers. Though she got to live that dream for a while, she left "the beautiful forests" in the 1980s in an effort to try to stop them from being destroyed.
At a conference on chimpanzee studies in 1986 she learned from other research in shocking detail the rate at which forests and the animals that inhabited them were being destroyed.
"(I learned how) the foreign logging companies were coming in and not just taking the timber out, (but) making roads and along the roads the hunters went.
"I went into that conference a scientist and came out an activist," she said. "There are already forests where there are virtually no animals."
Today Goodall's Roots & Shoots organization has branches all over the world -- including one at WestConn -- that work on environmental and conservation efforts. The Jane Goodall Institute works to preserve rain forests in Africa and elsewhere using a holistic approach that addresses the humanitarian needs of the people who live near the forests. Goodall spends much of her time now traveling around the world giving speeches in an effort to galvanize conservation efforts.
The crowd in Danbury was impressed by Goodall's words.
"I found it extremely inspiring," said Rachael Wilk, 23, a WestConn senior.
Derek Donelle, 38, had traveled all the way from Montreal, Canada, to hear Goodall speak. He had first heard her speak four years ago and said it was life changing.
"She inspired me to change careers," Donelle said. He stopped working with computers and today works at a chimpanzee sanctuary in Canada called the Fauna Foundation.
Carl Tramontana, 55, of Brewster, N.Y., was at the lecture along with his 9-year-old daughter, Julie. He said of Goodall, "She has positive energy that's necessary for young and old," and "to hear her passion after so many years of this, it's just amazing."