Jane Goodall's Gracious Tenacity

A Language of God reflection

The first thing I noticed when Jane logged into our remote recording app is that she’s looking pretty old. That’s understandable, since she’s 87. The next thing I noticed is that her voice is still very recognizable. It’s always a little surreal when you hear a voice in actual conversation that you’ve heard many times on recordings. And then the most important thing I noticed is that her mind is really sharp, she’s very gracious, and can be quite tenacious.

Jane Goodall and Francis Collins have been friends for a decade or more. And they obviously really like and respect each other. But there can’t help but be a bit of tension between someone who pushes for animal rights and someone at the top of the medical research system.

They met each other at a DC dinner, when Jane pushed Francis — then the new director of the NIH — to stop experimenting on chimpanzees. Francis promised to look into it, and then did stop the NIH use of chimps. That endeared Francis to Jane, and they have been good friends ever since. She comes to tea every time she’s in town, and at one these even got a ride on Francis’s motorcycle (or at least a staged photo).

That relationship didn’t give Francis a pass, though, when we got talking about COVID and vaccine development during the podcast. Francis made a point to commend and thank all the scientists who gave up their own projects to work on getting this vaccine out so quickly, and Jane wanted to make sure Francis was also thankful to the many monkeys who were experimented on to make these vaccines work. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t have done it, just that it’s ironic that we caused this disease by mistreating animals and we’re trying to solve it by mistreating animals.” Francis sent me an email after the interview saying it was entirely appropriate for Jane to bring that up; she wouldn’t have been true to herself if she hadn’t.

I suppose that brief exchange should have prepared us for the comments section on Facebook when we premiered the video of their conversation. The PETA people came out in force to object to the NIH and how they have mistreated monkeys. I don’t know the details of these experiments, and find myself deeply conflicted about it. But I do know that Jane’s approach is going to win a lot more converts than arguments and name-calling do. She says, “assume the best about people” and treat them with respect. That’s the graciousness. Then keep after them by appealing to common values. That’s the tenacity.

Find the whole conversation at the BioLogos website or wherever you listen to podcasts.