She presented a petition bearing 150,000 names to lawmakers at the European Parliament. It called on the lawmakers and the EU's executive office to find methods of testing that do not involve animals.
Goodall joined with animal rights groups to pressure European Union governments to revise EU rules from 1986 by expanding expand a ban on the use of animals in testing -- and to promote alternative technologies for medical research.
"Where is the big encouragement, where is the political will, where is the funding for this kind of research and where are the prizes?" Goodall asked. "Why is animal-alternative work never recognized in the Nobel Prize for medicine, for example?"
The governments of the European Union's 27 member countries, and industries in those countries, need to meet a 2009 deadline imposed by EU law. The law will ban most cosmetics tested on animals from the European Union.
But it will not entirely ban testing animals in medical research.
However, the European Commission and the cosmetics, chemicals and pharmaceuticals industries agreed in 2006 to voluntarily reduce and eventually replace animal testing for new medicines and other consumer products within the EU.
Scientist Gill Langley, from the British-based Dr. Hadwen Trust, an advocacy group that opposes animal testing in medical research, said about 12 million animals are used each year in experiments across the EU.
"The leading user countries include France, Britain and Germany," said Langley. "Many of the countries that do those experiments don't keep statistics at all," she said.
Around the world, she said, an estimated 115 million animals are used for medical testing every year. She said the United States was the world's "single largest user" of animals for medical testing.
Langley pointed to studies that found that animal testing was not able to predict the effect of drugs on humans in 50 to 99 percent of cases.
Langley suggested the EU encourage more voluntary testing on humans and better use of computer models to predict the effects of new medicines on human health.
Goodall revolutionized research on primates during the 1960s when she studied them at close range in Tanzania.
She documented tool use, emotions and war in the chimpanzee groups she observed, and her books and TV specials about her work at the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve sparked the world's curiosity about apes.
Those studies have made it clear, she said, that no sharp line can be drawn between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom.
