Introduction: The Scientist’s Dilemma—A Feeling for the Organism or a Dispassionate Gaze?
The archetype of the scientist is etched into the cultural imagination with a cool, dispassionate clarity. We picture the figure in a white coat, distanced from the subject of inquiry, for whom objectivity is the cardinal virtue and emotion a dangerous contaminant.¹ This traditional view of scientific methodology, rooted in the philosophical assumption that reality can be discovered through systematic observation and experimentation by a rational observer, posits a necessary separation between the knower and the known.² To feel is to be biased; to understand is to remain apart.
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Yet, scattered across the history of science are figures who trouble this pristine image, practitioners who suggest an alternative, and arguably more fruitful, scientific posture. We see Jane Goodall, not in a sterile lab, but sitting patiently for months in the lush forests of Gombe, allowing the chimpanzees to accept her presence until she could become a part of their world.³ We see the Nobel laureate geneticist Barbara McClintock, alone in her cornfield, developing what her biographer would call “a feeling for the organism,” an intimate connection so profound she claimed to know each plant as an individual.⁴ And we see the neurologist Oliver Sacks, listening with unwavering attention not just for symptoms, but for the story of the person living within a bewildering pathology, seeking to understand the human experience from the inside out.⁵
These pioneers exemplify a different way of knowing, one that challenges the dogma of detachment. Their work animates the proposition at the heart of this report: that far from being a liability, a disciplined form of empathy is a powerful engine of scientific discovery. It enhances, rather than diminishes, insight by allowing the researcher to “feel one’s way into the experience of another”⁶ or another system, unlocking perspectives that remain invisible to a purely objective gaze. This is not a call for sentimentality, but for a recognition of what some researchers now term “scientific empathy”—the very “process of seeking creative solutions in scientific practice by becoming one with the object of research.”⁷ It is a methodological stance, a metaphysical connection that stimulates and maintains the desire to inquire.⁸
This essay will argue that this empathetic eye does not see less clearly; it sees more deeply. First, it will establish a philosophical framework for understanding where empathy fits within the scientific process. It will then explore the powerful and paradigmatic case of Jane Goodall, whose empathetic primatology redefined our relationship with the animal kingdom. Broadening the lens, it will examine similar patterns in genetics and neurology before confronting the potent counterarguments against empathy as a rational guide. Finally, it will conclude that the most transformative scientific insights arise not from a sterile opposition of reason and emotion, but from their dynamic and harmonious synthesis.
Part I: The Architecture of Insight—Discovery, Justification, and the ‘Happy Thought’
To understand how empathy can function as a legitimate tool of science, one must first appreciate the architecture of scientific progress itself. For much of the twentieth century, philosophers of science, following the influential work of Hans Reichenbach, drew a sharp distinction between the “context of discovery” and the “context of justification.”⁹ The context of justification is the domain of rigor and logic. Once a hypothesis has been proposed, this is the realm where it is systematically tested, where evidence is weighed, and where its validity is either confirmed or falsified according to established canons of scientific method.¹⁰ It is the methodical, procedural aspect of science that is most familiar and most easily taught.
The context of discovery, however, is a far more enigmatic territory. This is the realm of creation, the process by which a new idea or a novel hypothesis is conceived in the first place.¹¹ It is the home of the “eureka moment,” the intuitive flash of insight, the “happy thought” that sets a new course for inquiry.¹² For a long time, this creative act was considered to be outside the scope of rational analysis. Thinkers like William Whewell argued that the origin of a “happy thought” was a “fortunate cast of intellect, rising above all rules,” a non-rational “leap of insight that cannot be captured in specific instructions.”¹³ In this view, discovery was the province of genius or luck, a mystical event that could be studied by psychologists or sociologists, but not systematized by philosophers of science.
This relegation of discovery to a black box of inexplicable creativity, however, creates a profound problem: it dismisses the most innovative part of the scientific enterprise as being beyond methodical comprehension. It is here that the concept of scientific empathy offers a powerful alternative. Rather than viewing the “eureka moment” as a random bolt from the blue, we can reframe it as the culmination of a sustained and disciplined process of perspective-taking. Empathy, particularly in its cognitive form—the ability to understand another’s perspective or mental state¹⁴—can function as a powerful, analyzable heuristic within the context of discovery. It is the very work that prepares the mind for the “happy thought.”
This process is not one of passive emotional resonance but of active, imaginative modeling. The scientist who practices this methodological empathy immerses herself in the system she is studying, attempting to understand its logic, pressures, and relationships from an internal point of view. She seeks to “become” part of the system, to experience the world from the perspective of one of its components.⁸ This sustained effort to see the world through another’s eyes—be it a chimpanzee, a cell, or a patient—builds a rich, intuitive model that allows for the generation of hypotheses that would be unthinkable from a detached, external perspective. The “happy thought,” then, is not an accident. It is the predictable, if not algorithmically guaranteed, product of a sustained empathetic process. Empathy, in this light, is not the enemy of reason to be purged during the context of justification; it is the engine of the creative reasoning that makes justification possible in the first place. It transforms the act of discovery from a mystery into an art.
Part II: In the Shadow of Man—Jane Goodall and the Primatology of Personhood
Perhaps no story in modern science better illustrates the power of empathy as a tool of discovery than that of Jane Goodall. When the renowned paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey sent the 26-year-old Goodall to the Gombe Stream Game Reserve in Tanzania in 1960, he did so with a specific intention. He chose her precisely for her lack of formal scientific training, believing he needed “an open mind,” one unburdened by the rigid theoretical dogmas of the academy.³⁹ He intuited that a woman might be more patient and less threatening, and thus a better observer of the elusive chimpanzees whose behavior, he hoped, would shed light on early humans.⁵⁶
Goodall’s subsequent methodology was, by the standards of the day, a litany of scientific heresies. She engaged in long-term, patient immersion, slowly habituating the chimps to her presence.³⁴ Most controversially, she rejected the established protocol of assigning numbers to her subjects. Instead, she gave them names: David Greybeard, Flo, Fifi, Flint.⁴³ This simple act was a profound methodological choice. It framed her subjects not as interchangeable data points, but as individuals with unique personalities, histories, and relationships.⁴⁵
The scientific establishment reacted with predictable scorn. At Cambridge, where she pursued a PhD without an undergraduate degree, she was told she had done everything wrong.³⁶ She was accused of committing “the worst of ethological sins—anthropomorphism,” the unscientific projection of human characteristics onto animals.⁴⁵ She was informed that she could not speak of chimpanzees having personalities, minds, or emotions, for these were the exclusive domain of Homo sapiens.⁴⁸ What her critics saw as a sentimental, amateurish flaw, however, was in fact the very key that unlocked a new universe of understanding. Her empathy was not a bias; it was her primary instrument of observation.
By naming the chimps, Goodall was able to follow their individual life stories over decades, revealing a social world of staggering complexity. A methodology focused on numbered subjects and discrete, quantifiable behaviors could never have perceived the long-term social dramas she documented: the intricate hierarchies, the shifting political alliances, the betrayals, the tender and enduring maternal bonds, and the transmission of learned traditions across generations.³⁵ A “war,” for instance, is not a single, measurable event; it is a pattern of targeted aggression unfolding over years between known individuals with established histories and territories. Only by seeing the chimps as “persons” in a social narrative could she perceive the war at all.⁴⁰
This empathetic stance led directly to her most revolutionary discoveries. In the autumn of 1960, she watched the chimpanzee she had named David Greybeard strip leaves from a twig and use it to “fish” for termites in a mound.³⁸ This was not just an interesting behavior; it was an earth-shattering observation. At the time, tool use was considered a defining characteristic of humanity. Upon hearing the news, Leakey famously telegraphed, “Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as human.”⁴² This insight was possible because Goodall was not just watching a chimpanzee; she was watching David Greybeard, an individual whose intentions and motivations she was trying to understand. Her focus on his personhood allowed her to recognize the purposefulness and significance of his subtle actions.
Crucially, Goodall’s empathy was not a romantic projection of idealized humanity. It was a tool for seeing the chimpanzees in their full, complex, and often disturbing reality. It was her close, long-term observation that led to the discovery of their darker side, including organized, warlike violence between communities and even acts of cannibalism.³² These were objective findings that ran directly counter to any sentimental desire for the chimps to be gentle, peaceful beings. Her immersion allowed her to see the truth of their nature, both the light and the shadow.
Goodall herself has always been the most eloquent defender of her approach. “You cannot share your life with a dog,” she once remarked, “…and not know perfectly well that animals have personalities, minds and feelings.”⁵¹ Her work vindicated this intuitive knowledge, forcing science to accept that the line between humans and other animals was far more blurry than it had been comfortable admitting.⁴¹ Her legacy demonstrates that what was dismissed as anthropomorphism was, in fact, a radical and necessary epistemological stance. By using the framework of human social and emotional life as a working hypothesis, she could perceive and interpret a universe of behavior that was simply invisible to the prevailing stimulus-response paradigm. She gave science a new language for understanding our closest relatives, and in doing so, she gave us a new way of understanding ourselves. As she would later reflect, “Only when our clever brain and our human heart work together in harmony can we achieve our true potential.”⁵⁰
Read Farewell Dame Jane Goodall, Pioneer Who Redefined Humanity
Part III: A Wider Lens—The Empathetic Stance Across the Disciplines
The case of Jane Goodall is not an isolated anomaly but a powerful exemplar of a recurring pattern in the history of scientific breakthroughs. Across vastly different fields, from the microscopic world of the genome to the deeply personal world of the human mind, we find that revolutionary insights have often been the product of a similarly immersive, empathetic stance. This suggests that “scientific empathy” is not a domain-specific quirk of primatology but a transferable cognitive approach, a fundamental way of knowing that transcends disciplinary boundaries.
The Cytologist’s Communion: Barbara McClintock
Decades before Goodall set foot in Gombe, the geneticist Barbara McClintock was conducting work that would, much later, earn her a Nobel Prize. Like Goodall, she worked in relative isolation, her ideas often dismissed as eccentric or incomprehensible by her colleagues.⁸⁶ Her subject was not a primate society but the genetic makeup of maize. Her method, however, was one of profound communion. Her biographer, Evelyn Fox Keller, famously titled her book A Feeling for the Organism, capturing the essence of McClintock’s approach.⁸⁷
McClintock described her process as one of developing an intense, intimate familiarity with her subject. She needed to “let the material tell you what to do” and to have the “time to hear what it has to say.” This required a deep listening, an openness that allowed her to see beyond the prevailing theoretical models of the gene as a static bead on a string. She spoke of knowing every plant in her field individually, of understanding the organism at a level so deep that she could see the chromosomes under the microscope and feel she was part of the system. This profound, empathetic connection with the organism—a non-sentient plant—is what allowed her to perceive a phenomenon that her peers could not: that genetic elements could move, or “jump,” from one place to another on the chromosome. This discovery of transposable elements was so far ahead of its time that it was largely ignored for decades, only to be rediscovered and validated with the advent of molecular biology. McClintock’s “feeling for the organism” was not mystical; it was a form of deep, systemic empathy that allowed her to generate a hypothesis directly from an intuitive understanding of the whole, long before the tools existed to prove it reductively.
The Neurologist’s Narrative: Oliver Sacks
A similar pattern emerges in the work of the celebrated neurologist and author Oliver Sacks. In an era of medicine that was becoming increasingly specialized and impersonal, Sacks championed a deeply humanistic approach.⁵⁷ He argued that to understand a neurological condition, one could not simply diagnose a disease; one had to understand the person experiencing it. His guiding principle, borrowed from the physician William Osler, was: “Ask not what disease the person has, but rather what person the disease has.”⁶³
Sacks’s method was fundamentally narrative and empathetic. He spent countless hours with his patients, listening to their stories, entering into their subjective worlds, and trying to comprehend the reality of living with conditions that radically altered their perception and identity.⁵⁹ This approach, which he called a “romantic neurology,” sought to find the “I” within the clinical “it”—the personhood that persisted even in the face of devastating pathology.⁵⁹ From this empathetic immersion came the extraordinary insights documented in his bestselling books like Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.⁶¹ He did not just describe Tourette’s syndrome; he introduced us to “Witty Ticcy Ray” and the creative torrent that his tics unleashed. He did not just explain autism; he allowed us to see the world through the eyes of Temple Grandin, an “anthropologist on Mars.”⁵⁸
By focusing on the unique, inmost story of each patient, Sacks revealed the adaptive and creative ways the brain constructs a world, even under the most bizarre of circumstances. He showed that a person is not their disease, but a unique narrative that continues to unfold. This perspective changed not only the public perception of these disorders but also clinical practice, emphasizing a more holistic, patient-centered model of care. For Sacks, wisdom came not just from examining the disease, but from the empathetic act of “examining the person with disease,” which in turn grants “wisdom about life.”⁶⁵
The common thread connecting Goodall, McClintock, and Sacks is the radical power of their epistemic stance. Each, in their own way, rejected the premise of detached observation in favor of immersive participation. Their empathy was directed at different objects—an animal society, a genetic system, a human consciousness—but the process was the same. It was the disciplined practice of setting aside preconceived notions to understand a complex system on its own terms, from the inside out. Their collective experience challenges the notion of a single, monolithic “scientific method,” suggesting instead that the path to profound discovery sometimes requires not a microscope, but a mirror.
Part IV: A Disciplined Heart—Navigating the Perils and Power of Empathy
To champion empathy as a scientific virtue is not to ignore its well-documented flaws as a moral guide. The case against empathy has been most cogently articulated by psychologists like Paul Bloom, who argues that it is a “capricious and irrational emotion” that often leads to poor judgment and immoral outcomes.¹³ This critique is formidable and must be addressed directly to understand the specific, disciplined role empathy can play in science.
Bloom’s argument rests on several key observations. First, empathy is notoriously biased. We are far more prone to feel for those who are attractive, who resemble us, or who belong to our in-group.¹⁵ Second, empathy is innumerate. It suffers from the “identifiable victim effect,” compelling us to care more about the plight of a single, named individual than about the suffering of a statistical multitude. As Mother Teresa is said to have remarked, “If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”¹⁵ This quirk of our psychology can lead to profoundly unjust allocations of resources, favoring the one we feel for over the many we do not.¹⁸ Third, the act of “feeling another’s pain”—what is known as affective empathy or emotional contagion—can lead to “empathic distress.” This state is personally exhausting, can lead to burnout, and may paradoxically cause us to withdraw from the suffering other rather than help them.¹⁵, ²⁵ For these reasons, Bloom proposes an alternative: “rational compassion.” This is a more distanced concern for the well-being of others, guided not by a vicarious sharing of feeling, but by a cool, reasoned analysis of consequences and a commitment to justice.¹⁷
This critique is powerful, but its power derives from a crucial conflation. It treats empathy as a monolithic faculty and applies its failures in one context—moral decision-making and public policy—to all others. To rescue the role of empathy in science, we must draw a clear distinction between its different forms and functions. Psychology distinguishes between affective empathy, the vicarious sharing of emotion, and cognitive empathy, the more detached ability to understand or take on another’s perspective.³ The empathy that Bloom rightly criticizes is primarily the affective, emotionally contagious kind. The empathy practiced by Goodall, Sacks, and McClintock, however, is a disciplined, primarily cognitive empathy. It is used not as a guide for altruistic action or moral judgment, but as a methodological tool for scientific discovery. Its goal is not to help the subject, but to understand it.
This “methodological empathy” is not about being overwhelmed by another’s pain, but about imaginatively reconstructing another’s worldview to generate a novel hypothesis. When Jane Goodall observed the Gombe chimpanzee war, her discovery was not driven by an emotional siding with one faction or another, which would be the pitfall of affective empathy. It was driven by a cognitive effort to understand the motivations, strategies, and social dynamics that constituted the conflict from the chimpanzees’ perspective. The process of discovery and the process of moral evaluation are distinct. While affective empathy might be a poor guide for the latter, cognitive empathy is an indispensable tool for the former.
The debate, therefore, is not a simple binary of empathy versus objectivity. It is a more nuanced choice between two different paradigms of achieving scientific understanding, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.
| Feature | The Detached Paradigm | The Empathetic Paradigm |
| Role of Observer | Detached, “Objective” Outsider | Immersed Participant-Observer |
| Subject Identification | Numbering, Categorization | Naming, Individuation |
| Primary Data | Quantifiable behaviors, measurements | Narrative, relational patterns, subjective accounts |
| Source of Hypothesis | A priori deductive logic | Intuitive insight from perspective-taking |
| Potential Pitfall | Missing context, systemic patterns | Anthropomorphism, confirmation bias |
| Exemplars | B.F. Skinner’s behaviorism | Goodall, Sacks, McClintock |
The traditional model seeks objectivity through distance, believing that separation prevents the researcher’s biases from coloring the data. The empathetic model seeks a different, more profound kind of objectivity through immersion. By attempting to understand the system on its own terms, from the inside, the researcher can reduce the risk of projecting their own a priori assumptions onto it. Goodall’s discovery of chimp warfare is the ultimate proof of this principle. A romantic, undisciplined empathy might have led her to see only peaceful “noble savages.” Her disciplined, methodological empathy forced her to see the objective truth of their capacity for violence—a finding that was as undeniable as it was unsettling. Empathy, then, is not the opposite of objectivity. It is a rigorous and demanding pathway toward it.
Conclusion: Reconciling the Brain and the Heart
The image of the cold, detached scientist, while culturally potent, represents an incomplete and often misleading picture of the scientific enterprise. The history of discovery is rich with stories of researchers whose greatest breakthroughs came not from standing apart from the world, but from entering into a deep and empathetic relationship with it. A disciplined, cognitive empathy, far from being a corrupting influence, has repeatedly shown itself to be a vital, if often unacknowledged, tool in the creative “context of discovery.”
The paradigm-shifting work of Jane Goodall, who saw personhood where others saw only animals; of Barbara McClintock, who felt the systemic logic of an organism that others saw only as data; and of Oliver Sacks, who found the narrative of a human life where others saw only a clinical pathology, collectively demonstrates a powerful principle. Across the disparate fields of primatology, genetics, and neurology, an empathetic stance has proven to be a wellspring of novel hypotheses and profound insights. It allows the scientist to ask questions that would not have occurred to a detached observer and to perceive patterns that are invisible from a distance.
This understanding is not merely a historical curiosity; it is being actively validated and operationalized in contemporary science. In medicine, empathy is no longer seen as a soft, optional “bedside manner” but as a crucial clinical skill. Empathy training programs, grounded in neuroscience, are now recognized as essential for improving diagnostic accuracy, ensuring patient adherence to treatment, and preventing physician burnout.⁵, ⁷² The empathetic physician is understood to be a more effective physician because they can gather higher-quality information and build the trust necessary for healing.⁷⁶ Similarly, in the face of ecological crises, fields like conservation biology are developing concepts such as “ecological empathy” to foster a deeper, more relational understanding of the intricate interdependencies between human and non-human systems, recognizing that such a connection is a prerequisite for effective action.⁸², ⁸³
The cogent critiques of empathy—that it is biased, innumerate, and emotionally draining—are not to be dismissed. They are essential warnings against a naive, undisciplined sentimentality. But they fail to distinguish between the emotional contagion that can cloud moral judgment and the disciplined, cognitive perspective-taking that can sharpen scientific insight. The scientists celebrated here were not slaves to emotion; they were masters of a particular kind of attention, one that used a disciplined heart to guide a clever brain.
Ultimately, the most transformative science may arise from a fusion of our capacities for rigorous analysis and for profound connection. The greatest leaps forward occur not when we gaze upon the world from a sterile remove, but when we have the courage to look into its eyes and see a subject, not an object. It is in that moment of recognition—that empathetic connection—that the most illuminating questions are born. As Jane Goodall so wisely observed, it is “only when our clever brain and our human heart work together in harmony can we achieve our full potential.”⁵² The empathetic eye does not see less clearly; it sees more deeply.
Footnotes
¹ Stanley Sobottka, “Objective Reality,” in A Course in Consciousness, 2008, quoted in “Philosophy of Science,” Wikipedia, accessed November 20, 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science.² Hugh Gauch, Scientific Method in Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), quoted in “Philosophy of Science,” Wikipedia.
³ Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971).
⁴ Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1983).
⁵ Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales (New York: Summit Books, 1985).
⁶ Theodore Lipps, “Einfühlung, innere Nachahmung, und Organempfindungen,” Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie 1 (1903): 185–204, discussed in Helen Riess, “The Science of Empathy,” Journal of Patient Experience 4, no. 2 (2017): 74–77.
⁷ Sun-Kyoung Lee and Hye-Gyoung Yoon, “An Instrument for Measuring Scientific Empathy in Students,” Frontiers in Education 8 (2023): 1254436, https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2023.1254436.
⁸ Sun-Kyoung Lee and Hye-Gyoung Yoon, “Scientific Empathy as a Catalyst for Disciplinary Engagement in Science,” Frontiers in Education 8 (2023).
⁹ Hans Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction: An Analysis of the Foundations and the Structure of Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938).
¹⁰ “Philosophy of Science,” Britannica, accessed November 20, 2023, https://www.britannica.com/topic/philosophy-of-science.
¹¹ “Scientific Discovery,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, last modified June 12, 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/scientific-discovery/.
¹² William Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded upon Their History (London: John W. Parker, 1840).
¹³ Whewell, Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, quoted in “Scientific Discovery,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
¹⁴ “Empathy,” Wikipedia, accessed November 20, 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy.
¹⁵ Paul Bloom, “Against Empathy,” Boston Review, March 10, 2014, https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/paul-bloom-against-empathy/.
¹⁶ C. Daniel Batson et al., “Immorality From Empathy-Induced Altruism: When Compassion and Justice Conflict,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 68, no. 6 (1995): 1042–54.
¹⁷ Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (New York: Ecco, 2016).
¹⁸ Jill Suttie, “Would the World Be Better Off without Empathy?” Greater Good Magazine, December 8, 2016, https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/would_the_world_be_better_off_without_empathy.
³² Jane Goodall, “Gombe 60: A Legacy of Discovery,” Jane Goodall Institute, accessed November 20, 2023, https://janegoodall.org/make-a-difference/gombe-60/.
³⁴ “In the Shadow of Man: Jane Goodall,” textbook-ga-24-2-17, accessed November 20, 2023, https://www.welcomehomevetsofnj.org/textbook-ga-24-2-17/in-the-shadow-of-man-jane-goodall-1.pdf.
³⁵ “What Jane Goodall Has Taught Us About Chimpanzees,” Ensemble Studio Theatre, March 3, 2025, https://www.ensemblestudiotheatre.org/est-blog-1/2025/3/3/what-jane-goodall-has-taught-us-about-chimpanzees-2.
³⁶ “Unorthodox Approaches & Eccentrism,” Weebly, accessed November 20, 2023, http://77061566.weebly.com/unorthodox-approaches–eccentrism.html.
³⁸ “Conservationist Jane Goodall, Renowned for Chimpanzee Research, Dies at 91,” PBS NewsHour, October 1, 2025, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/conservationist-jane-goodall-renowned-for-chimpanzee-research-dies-at-91.
³⁹ Mireya Mayor, “Jane Goodall, the Gentle Disrupter Whose Research on Chimpanzees Redefined What It Meant to Be Human,” FIU News, October 2, 2025, https://news.fiu.edu/2025/jane-goodall-the-gentle-disrupter-whose-research-on-chimpanzees-redefined-what-it-meant-to-be-human.
⁴⁰ “Gombe 60,” Jane Goodall Institute.
⁴¹ “Conservationist Jane Goodall,” PBS NewsHour.
⁴² Mayor, “Jane Goodall, the Gentle Disrupter.”
⁴³ “The Evolution of Dr. Jane Goodall,” Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, accessed November 20, 2023, https://nhm.org/stories/evolution-dr-jane-goodall.
⁴⁵ “Unorthodox Approaches,” Weebly.
⁴⁸ Karen Weintraub, “Wild and Captive Chimpanzees Share Personality Traits With Humans,” New York Times, October 23, 2017, quoted in Marc Bekoff, “Chimpanzee Personalities: Jane Goodall Redux,” Psychology Today, October 24, 2017, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animal-emotions/201710/chimpanzee-personalities-jane-goodall-redux.
⁵⁰ “Jane Goodall on Empathy,” Daily Good, October 26, 2014, https://www.dailygood.org/story/878/jane-goodall-on-empathy-maria-popova/.
⁵¹ Jane Goodall, quoted on Reddit, r/QuotesPorn, 2015, https://www.reddit.com/r/QuotesPorn/comments/4zu1gm/you_cannot_share_your_life_with_a_dog_and_not/.
⁵² “Jane Goodall Quotes,” The Environment Show, accessed November 20, 2023, https://www.environmentshow.com/jane-goodall-quotes/.
⁵⁶ Adam Bernstein, “Jane Goodall, Who Redefined Man’s Place in the Animal Kingdom, Dies at 91,” Washington Post, October 1, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2025/10/01/jane-goodall-dead/.
⁵⁷ Sara Mederos et al., “The Humanistic Neurologist: How Dr. Oliver Sacks’ Personal Journey Shaped His Patient-Centered Approach,” Cureus 16, no. 5 (2024): e59998, https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.59998.
⁵⁸ “Oliver Sacks: A Doctor and a Storyteller,” PBS LearningMedia, accessed November 20, 2023, https://www.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/sacks21-a-doctor-and-a-storyteller-video/oliver-sacks-his-own-life/.
⁵⁹ George Scialabba, “Tumult and Sympathy,” Commonweal Magazine, November 15, 2017, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/tumult-and-sympathy.
⁶¹ “Oliver Sacks: The Value of Storytelling & Empathy,” Blink UX, accessed November 20, 2023, https://blinkux.com/uploads/ideas-snapshots/oliver-sacks.pdf.
⁶³ “The Medical Humanity of Oliver Sacks, in His Own Words,” The Hastings Center, August 31, 2015, https://www.thehastingscenter.org/the-medical-humanity-of-oliver-sacks-in-his-own-words/.
⁶⁵ Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
⁷² “Building Empathy into the Structure of Health Care,” Harvard Medical School, accessed November 20, 2023, https://learn.hms.harvard.edu/insights/all-insights/building-empathy-structure-health-care.
⁷⁶ Mohammed Aldawood, “The Role of Empathy in Medicine from a Medical Student’s Perspective,” AMA Journal of Ethics 9, no. 6 (2007): 435–439, https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/role-empathy-medicine-medical-students-perspective/2007-06.
⁸² Stephanie E. E. E. McWethy, “Ecological Empathy: Relational Theory and Practice,” People and Nature (2024), https://doi.org/10.1080/26395916.2024.2396919.
⁸³ McWethy, “Ecological Empathy: Relational Theory and Practice,” ResearchGate, accessed November 20, 2023, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/385119774_Ecological_empathy_relational_theory_and_practice.
⁸⁶ “A Feeling for the Organism,” Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, accessed November 20, 2023, https://cshlvirtualstore.com/products/a-feeling-for-the-organism.
⁸⁷ “A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock,” Kusske Design Initiative, University of Minnesota, accessed November 20, 2023, https://kdi.umn.edu/resources/feeling-organism-life-and-work-barbara-mcclintock.
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