Dr. Galdikas is currently a professor at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia and a Professor Extraordinaire at Universitas Nasional in Jakarta, Indonesia. Biruté Galdikas has devoted her life to studying orangutans. She wanted to understand why these great apes did not evolve the way our ancestors did into human beings who lived and worked in communities. Orangutans never learned this. They have not changed in millions of years because the forests where they live have not changed. They have always had enough food and space to continue their solitary existence. Galdikas has learned more than any other human being about what it means to be an orangutan, and what she has found out is that orangutans like to be left alone. An adult male’s range is at least 40 square kilometres, and he can spend weeks loping slowly from tree to tree eating fruits, nuts, insects, leaves and bark without meeting any of his kin.
She was born in Wiesbaden, Germany but became a naturalized Canadian citizen and grew up in Toronto. She earned a degree in psychology and biology in 1966 and went on to earn an MA jointly conferred by the University of British Columbia and UCLA. While at UCLA and then a PhD at UCLA. While a graduate student there, she met Kenyan palaeontologist Steven Leachy. He, with the aid of National Geographic, subsequently helped her set up a research camp to conduct field study on orang-utans in Borneo. She has been called the third of Leachey’s Angels (Jane Goodall who studies chimpanzees and Dian Fossey who studied mountain gorillas are the other two). IN 1971 Galdikas and her then husband a photographer went to Tanjung Putting Reserve in Indonesia. In the time since then, she has greatly expanded human knowledge of orang-utan behaviour, habitat and diet. She has also made contributions to scientific understanding of rainforests and biodiversity.
Galdikas's has focused on the rehabilitation of many orphaned orangutans through her organization Orangutan Foundation International. It is done with the help of her husband Pak Bohap, a rice farmer and tribal president and co-director of the orangutan program in Borneo. Her study is now one of the longest continuously running studies of a mammal ever conducted. Her memoir is entitled “Reflections of Eden’. Both Galdikas and Jane Goodall were awarded the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement laureates in 1997 for their work in field research and lifetime contributions to the advancement of environmental science.
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