Dame Jane Goodall admits parts of book were lifted from online A spokesman for Dame Jane declined to comment. At least a dozen passages in their book appear to have been lifted from other authors' work, corporate websites and from Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that is written and edited by its users. "According to Oxfam," Dame Jane and Ms Hudson write at one stage, "a British nonprofit agency working to put an end to poverty worldwide, the spraying of pesticides on tea estates is often done by untrained casual daily-wage workers, sometimes even by children and adolescents." This sentence appears identically on the website of Choice Teas, an organic and "fair trade" tea company also based in Seattle, Washington, which donates to the Jane Goodall Institute in Virginia. The authors also appear to have lifted material for their discussion of John Bartram, a botanist from Philadelphia who during the 18th century shipped boxes of seeds from the US to Europe. "'Bartram's Boxes,' as they came to be known, were regularly sent to Peter Collinson for distribution to a wide list of European clients," they write. The sentence is amended only slightly from one in Bartram's Wikipedia page. Writings from a website about the history of tobacco and from Find Your Fate, an amateurish astrology site devoted to "love, life, religion and spirituality," also appear to have been copied for use in the book. Dame Jane's publisher, Grand Central, did not respond to a request for comment. It told The Washington Post that it was surprised at the findings and planned to add attributions to future printings. Dame Jane told the newspaper that she would discuss their findings in a forthcoming post on her blog. Seeds Of Hope, which Grand Central claims is "an enlightening story of the wonders we can find in our own backyards," is due to go on sale next month and is Dame Jane's 25th book. Among other stories it contains details of how botanists at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew germinated 200-year-old seeds as part of the Millennium Seed Bank project. The authors quote Matthew Daws, a former seed ecologist at Kew, who told The Washington Post that he had no recollection of speaking to them. He gave a similar quotation to the Gardens' official website. Dame Jane concedes over the course of the 384-page book that while she has always been fascinated by plants and trees, her experience in researching them as a scientist is more limited. Raised in Bournemouth and educated at Cambridge, she rose to prominence in the 1960s by publishing meticulous studies of chimpanzees in Tanzania, which challenged previous assumptions about the apes. During her more than 50-year career, she has been awarded five professorships, 24 academic degrees and some 61 prizes for her work. She was awarded a DBE in 2004 and is currently on a tour of the US promoting her new book.