Jane Goodall was a schoolgirl in England, barely older than the droopy-eyed chimpanzee now in her arms, when she decided she would live among Africa's animals, write books about them - and find Tarzan.
At age 11, she fell "madly in love" with the virile, jungle-raised hero of Edgar Rice Burroughs' stories."I was incredibly jealous of Tarzan's Jane, and I thought she was a real wimp, and I'd have made a much better mate for Tarzan myself," Goodall said in an interview. "That was when I had this dream of going to Africa."
Goodall did, of course, go, and she became the world's most renowned and revered primatologist.
That is the message Goodall delivers in her latest projects: advocating animal rights, raising money for chimpanzee sanctuaries and doing conservation work.
"What is remarkable now is how all of this is coming together, different bits of my passion, experience are just seeming to be in the right place at the right time now," she said.
Determined to learn about animals, Goodall worked as a waitress to earn her ship fare to Africa. At age 23, she settled into "a boring old secretarial job" in Nairobi, Kenya, until anthropologist Louis Leakey agreed to send her, untrained, to Tanzania to observe chimpanzees.
"Louis chose me without any scientific degree because he wanted an open mind," said Goodall, now 64. Dian Fossey, who studied gorillas, and Birute Gladikas, who studied orangutans, soon followed her.
At Gombe National Park, Good-all made two discoveries - chimpanzees eat meat and use long grass as a tool to pluck termites from a mound. She also described the personalities of her group of chimpanzees, making Flo, Flint, Fifi, Pom and Passion as familiar as family around the world.
She spoke of bonds, weak and strong, between mothers and infants, sibling rivalry, male dominance and sexual appetites all in humanlike terms: Flo was a wonderful mother, though promiscuous. Passion was cold-hearted and, with her daughter, killed and ate all but one of the offspring of other females.
When Flo died in 1972, The Times of London ran an obituary. She was found face down in a stream by her youngest son, Flint, who died from grief three weeks later.
"It's become like a soap opera. People are fascinated - what is the next installment in the Fifi story?" Goodall says.
For fans, she has an update: "They got this skin disease and Freud got sick, and so lost his top position to his younger brother, Frodo. Fifi lost her last baby."
Goodall is grateful she had no background in science when she began her work - it allowed her to view animals with greater compassion. But Leakey insisted she earn a doctorate.
"Louis told me, `Jane you must have a Ph.D. because if you don't, you'll never be able to get your own money and stand on your own feet, nor will you be able to make use of your facts,"' she said.
Now famous and equipped with a degree, "Dr. Jane," as she is popularly known, returned to Gombe, and what has become the world's longest study of wild animals - nearly 38 years.
Goodall said her idyllic life researching "incredible beings" in the forest was disrupted when she saw a horrific film of experiments on laboratory animals at a conference in Chicago in 1986.
"I knew I had to do something," she said. "It was payback time."
Goodall has taken advantage of her reputation to enlist the help of people great and small - from President Nelson Mandela of South Africa to schoolchildren in Billings, Mont. - in the fight against animal abuse.
"Doors open. They think of me as a legend. And they'll give me an appointment because they want to see if I'm real, and what I'm like," she said.
Goodall has passed through those doors to speak out against the abuse of animals, to open sanctuaries for illegally captured great apes and to encourage people everywhere to make the world a better place.