out with ketamine, take blood, wake him up, and send him on his way? (That’s what Billy Karesh had been equipped to do, with gorillas, during our eight-day stakeout at Moba Bai in the Republic of the Congo. But the protocols for well-studied and habituated chimpanzee populations are very different.) Egads, no! said field primatologists, horrified at the prospect of any such invasive violation of their sensitive, trusting subjects. It was a new realm for Hahn, with a new set of concerns and methods, to which she quickly became attuned. At a scientific meeting that brought primate researchers together with virologists, she met Richard Wrangham, of Harvard, highly respected for his work on the behavioral ecology and evolution of apes. Wrangham has for many years led a study of chimpanzees at Kibale National Park, in western Uganda; before that, four decades ago, he did his own PhD fieldwork at Gombe. He responded enthusiastically to Hahn’s idea of screening wild chimps, and ultimately it was Wrangham, she recalled, “who convinced Jane that we were okay to work with.” But before any such work began at Gombe, they looked at the chimps of Kibale, Wrangham’s own research site. Crucial help came from a Wrangham grad student named Martin Muller, who in 1998 had collected urine samples for a study of testosterone, aggression, and stress. Mario Santiago, of Hahn’s lab, cooked up the requisite tools for detecting SIVcpz antibodies in a few milliliters of piss, and Martin Muller supplied some frozen samples from his collections at Kibale. For this part of the story, I went to Albuquerque and talked with Muller, now an associate professor of anthropology at the University of New Mexico.
The Kibale samples all tested negative for SIV. “We were slightly disappointed,” Muller recalled. “That was because, at the time, the conventional wisdom was that this didn’t have any negative impacts on chimps.” Meanwhile, though, he was getting some interesting results in the hormone study and wanted to broaden his data. He and Wrangham agreed that it might be instructive to sample a few other chimp populations for comparison. That led Muller down to Gombe, in August 2000, with his urine-collecting bottles and all the cumbersome equipment necessary to keep samples frozen. He stayed only a couple weeks, training Tanzanian field assistants to continue the collecting, and brought away just a few samples himself. Back home in the United States, he emailed Hahn to ask whether she would like six tubes of frozen Gombe urine, to which she replied: “YES, YES, YES.” He sent them with coded labels, standard procedure, so Hahn had no way of knowing whose was whose. Two of the six tested positive for SIV antibodies. Breaking the code, Muller informed her that both samples came from a chimp named Gimble, a twenty-three-year-old male.
Gimble was a well-known member of one of the famed Gombe families; his mother had been Melissa, a successful matriarch, and his brothers included Goblin, who rose to be the community’s alpha male and lived to age forty. Gimble’s life and career would be different—and shorter.
Soon after getting the results on Gimble, Beatrice Hahn wrote a long email to Jane Goodall, explaining the context and the implications. Goodall herself had trained as an ethologist (she earned a PhD at Cambridge), not as a molecular biologist, and the realm of western blot analysis for antibodies was as alien to her as field sampling had been to Hahn. Goodall’s work on chimpanzees began back in July 1960, at what was then the Gombe Stream Game Reserve, on the east shore of Lake Tanganyika, and which later became Gombe National Park. She established the Gombe Stream Research Center in 1965, based in a small concrete building near the lake, and continued her study of chimps in the hilly forest for another twenty-one years. In 1986 Goodall published an imposing scientific opus, The Chimpanzees of Gombe, and then ended her own career as a field scientist because, appalled by the treatment of chimpanzees in medical labs and other captive situations around the world, she felt obliged to become an activist. The study of Gombe’s chimps went ahead in her absence, thanks to well-trained Tanzanian field assistants and later generations of scientists, adding decades of data and precious continuity to what Goodall had started. She remained closely connected to Gombe and its chimps, both personally and through the programs of her Jane Goodall Institute, but she wasn’t often present at the old research camp, apart from stolen interludes of rest