Meave Leakey Interview (page: 5 / 7) Pioneering Paleoanthropologist	Print Interview

How did you first become interested in science and exploration? We understand you were strongly attracted to nature as a child in England. Could you tell us about that?

Meave Leakey: I guess that's where it all started really. I don't remember much about it. I remember a little, but my mother tells me...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I was always collecting insects and caterpillars and this and that. We had a very small cottage because it was the war years, so my father was away in the war. We were living in a small cottage in Kent with woods all around it. So I used to go out and collect all these little insects and things like that. I really loved nature even in those days. My mother said -- we had a little porch and the porch was full of jars of things that I used to feed everyday -- she had a number of stories of how I kept little furry caterpillars. I used to keep them on a matchstick and go to bed with them and then they'd get out in the night and there were furry caterpillars all over the bed. But I don't remember too much about it. I just remember vague things. I think the memories --you never know how much you remember and how much you've been told and you put things together. But I think, really, in those days I was interested. Then, my father was very interested in natural history, and as a child he had always done that sort of thing. He used to take a lot of photographs, so he taught me how to develop and print photographs when I got older. He had all these wonderful pictures of wildlife and birds, and snakes and lizards, and all sorts of things. I remember just loving spending time with him in the workshop and in the dark room. And learning how, and seeing all his photographs that he hadn't really looked at for years and years.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

What kind of work did your father do?

Meave Leakey: He was a surgeon, an orthopedic surgeon. So he was working with bones, too. Another link!

You say your family had moved because of the war. Did that affect your schooling as well?

Meave Leakey: I think I was too young then. I was born in 1942, so by the time I was going to school the war was over. But I do remember in those early years there was no sugar, no sweets and no eggs, and no this or that. When these things gradually came back it was such a treat, these things that modern children take for granted.

Did your parents foster your love of nature?

Meave Leakey: Oh, very much so, particularly my father, I think. It was a shared love really. We used to have holidays down by the sea in Cornwall. Grubbing around in rock pools on the beach and things was another way that we shared that interest. Both my parents were very much country people, although he was always in the city, so my initial years, after the war years, I was actually living in a suburb of London.

Did you have brothers and sisters?

Meave Leakey: Yes, but my sister is four years younger than me, and my brother is nine years younger than me. So they were quite spaced out. We weren't all born together and growing up together. By the time that my brother was going to school I was in boarding school. My brother, in particular, I didn't get to know that well as a child.

What did they become? What do they do?

Meave Leakey: My brother became a geologist. He did some general geology, and then he worked for a firm, looking at geology to see the structure for buildings. My sister was also interested in natural history. She did her M.Sc. in Uganda actually, on a funny little animal called a potto. I don't know if you know what a potto is. It's a primate. It's a prosimian. It's related closely to the bush baby but it's very slow. You can't believe how slow it is when it moves. It's nocturnal, so poor Jeannie, my sister, was up all night watching this thing moving so slowly. But she was studying behavior of pottos for her M.Sc. and then eventually she went into teaching.

She must have been very patient.

Meave Leakey: I think so. I think it would have sent me to sleep.

What kind of student were you? What kind of school did you go to?

Meave Leakey: Initially I went to a convent as a day care, and then eventually my parents sent me to a girls' boarding school. It was a good school, but they didn't teach girls science. In those days, girls didn't really need to learn science it was thought. I don't think my parents realized this. When I finally took my A levels, they started saying, "What do you want to do before you take your A levels?"

How old are you when you take your A levels?

Meave Leakey: It's 16 or 17. And then, in the English system, you do another two years, and then you're qualified to go to university. So you chose your A levels depending on what subjects you wanted to do at university, depending on what career you wanted to choose. So you are really in a way having to choose whether you do science or arts at 16 and 17. I definitely knew I wanted to do science. There was no question. Because we hadn't done science at school, there was no way that I could qualify to go to university so I had to go to a technical college and do science O levels and then science A levels. Then I was qualified to go to university. So I had to sort of redo all that.

That was a long time to be in school.

Meave Leakey: It was. It was a technical college near our home. I sort of crammed it anyway.

In some medical schools there are more women than men nowadays. When you look back, it was really just a generation ago that women were not regarded as potential scientists.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Meave Leakey: Things have really changed, and dramatically changed I think. It's really encouraging now when I'm talking to students, in America particularly, that the student body is often more girls than men, young women than men. And it is, as you say, it's very quick. It's happened really quickly. I really wanted to do marine zoology, so I chose my university because there was a very good marine station there. I never dreamt I would be anything but a marine zoologist. It was straightforward as far as I could see. I went to a good school, got a good degree, and there you go. But when I started to apply for jobs, the answer was always negative, because I was a woman and they didn't have facilities (for women) on boats for men. You really can't do oceanography and marine zoology without going to sea. So it was just "No, no, no." Which is how I finally got into going to Africa and doing paleontology.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

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