On collaborating with Jane Goodall

For the last two decades, Penn virologist Beatrice Hahn has partnered with primate researchers in Africa to find the origin of HIV by studying a closely related virus, called simian immunodeficiency virus or SIV, that infects chimpanzees.

The key to those efforts: Famed primatologist Jane Goodall, who died last week at 91 after a lifetime of pioneering field research, activism, and education.

“She was an excellent scientist and understood the importance of what we are doing,” Hahn recalls of her collaborator. “She was also charismatic in the sense that she could draw people in, get their attention, and tell them how things were, and they saw it, believed it. I think she changed a number of people by simply educating them in an open and honest way.”

Twenty-five years ago, such partnerships between virologists and primatologists were controversial, Hahn recalls. At the time, some virologists wanted to develop an HIV vaccine which they thought would best be done in chimpanzees; primate researchers were understandably aghast at the idea, Hahn says. However, Goodall was pleased by Hahn’s approach to develop methods to diagnose SIV infection by testing chimp droppings, which meant that researchers would neither have to touch or otherwise disturb the chimpanzees. “The fact that we were doing something different, that we were establishing noninvasive methods, she was very much for that,” says Hahn.

The research team would need fecal and urine samples from habituated chimps, those that would allow humans to come close without running away. Their first connection was with Richard Wrangham, a researcher who had studied under Goodall and who forwarded samples from her team in Gombe National Park in Tanzania.

“I remember the day, a Friday afternoon at 5 p.m., when my lab members came to my office and showed me the picture of a ‘Western blot,’ which is a method to detect virus-specific antibodies. Clearly, there was an SIV-infected chimp in Gombe, no question,” Hahn recalls. “That’s when our collaboration really started.”

Other research with Goodall focused on identifying variant viruses, as well as what the viruses do to the chimps. Hahn’s team also helped identify chimp fathers with a large paternity analysis. “And we kept going, finding new projects of interest to both primatologists and virologists,” she says.

The noninvasive methods allowed researchers to track the human AIDS virus’ origins to chimpanzees and gorillas infected with a particular form of simian immunodeficiency virus common in west central Africa, Hahn says. They also documented SIV’s effects on chimpanzee populations, including an increased risk of death and decreased birth rates. The greatest mortality was seen in baby chimps that got the virus from their mothers.

“This was a very productive collaboration,” Hahn says. “Jane was always very supportive of us, and we did what we could to spread the word that you don’t have to harm these chimps in order to do science.”

Goodall also received the Wilton Krogman Award for Distinguished Achievement in Biological Anthropology from the Penn Museum in 2016, presented at the Philomathean Society Annual Oration. In presenting the award, Julian Siggers, Penn Museum director at the time, praised Goodall’s “strong scientific integrity, combined with her deep compassion for humans, animals and our shared environment, as well as her willingness to speak out on the things that matter.”