That followed a proposal two weeks earlier by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to list all chimpanzees, including those in captivity, as endangered. The plan would raise barriers for experimenting on chimps even higher, by requiring a permit for almost all medical research on the animals unless it involved only observation or tests that are part of normal veterinary visits. Permits would be granted only if the research was judged to be for the benefit of chimpanzees.

Dr. Goodall said the decisions were not the end of efforts to protect chimps in captivity, a campaign prompted by Animal Protection of New Mexico and expanded by groups like the Goodall Institute, the Humane Society of the United States and others.

“There are still chimpanzees in private labs,” she said, as well as in other countries, though Gabon is the only other country known to allow medical experimentation on the animals. It is, however, “a very, very important milestone along the way,” she said.

The path to the decisions began in June 2010, when the N.I.H. started to move 186 chimps, held in semiretirement at Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, N.M., back into the research stream. The plan was to move them to the Southwest National Primate Research Center at the Texas Biomedical Research Institute in San Antonio.

The animals had been used in research by the Coulston Foundation, at the Alamogordo facility, which closed after many allegations of mistreatment of the chimps. Save the Chimps brought some of the Coulston animals to Florida, where the group has the largest North American chimpanzee sanctuary. Others were still being held at the facility but were not used in research.

“That’s what triggered all of this,” said Sarah Baeckler Davis, now head of the North American Primate Sanctuary Alliance. One of the leaders of the movement, she has both a Ph.D. and a law degree. Dr. Davis had run a sanctuary and has worked with the Goodall Institute in the past. (“I read about her in fourth grade,” she said of Dr. Goodall, “and I wanted to be her.”)