Lab Girl

by Hope Jahren

People will tell you that you have to know math to be a scientist, or physics or chemistry. They’re wrong. That’s like saying you have to know how to knit to be a housewife, or that you have to know Latin to study the Bible. Sure, it helps, but there will be time for that. What comes first is a question, and you’re already there.

It might strike you as fantastic, but you really can hear plants growing in the Midwest.

She set her hair in curlers while listening to records of Carl Sandburg’s poems over and over, and instructed me on how to hear the words differently each time.

in science classes we did things instead of just sitting around talking about things. We worked with our hands and there were concrete and almost daily payoffs.

assured me of what I already suspected: that my true potential had more to do with my willingness to struggle than with my past and present circumstances.

LIKE MOST PEOPLE, I have a particular tree that I remember from my childhood.

From the teenagers’ perspective, the grown-up trees presented a future that was as stultifying as it was interminable. Nothing but fifty, eighty, maybe a hundred years of just trying not to fall down, unpunctuated by the piecemeal toil of replacing fallen needles every morning and shutting down enzymes every night.

Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume, and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life. It has also convinced me that carefully writing everything down is the only real defense we have against forgetting something important that once was and is no more, including the spruce tree that should have outlived me but did not.

Something so hard can be so easy if you just have a little help. In the right place, under the right conditions, you can finally stretch out into what you’re supposed to be.

Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable. Every replete tree was first a seed that waited.

Fortunately for the patient, there is a sleep-starved teenager apprenticed to a chain-smoking barmaid in the basement who is ready for action.

Working in the hospital teaches you that there are only two kinds of people in the world: the sick and the not sick. If you are not sick, shut up and help. Twenty-five years later, I still cannot reject this as an inaccurate worldview.

“I’m Armenian,” he said. “We’re most comfortable underground.”

I was the only person in an infinite exploding universe who knew that this powder was made of opal. In a wide, wide world, full of unimaginable numbers of people, I was—in addition to being small and insufficient—special.

On some deep level, the realization that I could do good science was accompanied by the knowledge that I had formally and terminally missed my chance to become like any of the women that I had ever known.

the most important thing I know about science: that experiments are not about getting the world to do what you want it to do.

I had been at the wrong baggage claim. Confused, I looked around me. I didn’t remember checking the carousel number. I also didn’t remember parking the car, and yet there I was, holding a ticket to the parking structure with the location “C2” written on it in my own handwriting. This sort of thing was happening to me frequently: snippets of time were lost here and there, and even as I compensated in order to hide it, it kept getting worse. I had even gone to see a doctor about it, who had examined me for all of forty-five seconds, told me I was working too hard, and then wrote me a refillable prescription for a mild sedative.

When it becomes very dry, a cactus sheds its roots to prevent the parched soil from sucking all the water back out of it. A cactus can live for four days with no roots and still continue to grow.

Love and learning are similar in that they can never be wasted.

It was the look that says, “Her? That can’t be right; there’s a mistake here somewhere.” Public and private organizations all over the world have studied the mechanics of sexism within science and have concluded that they are complex and multifactorial. In my own small experience, sexism has been something very simple: the cumulative weight of constantly being told that you can’t possibly be what you are.

Multiple light experiments have shown that the changing “photoperiod” is what triggers the tree to harden; it can be triggered in July if we fool the tree using artificial light. Hardening has worked for eons because a tree can trust the sun to tell it when winter is coming, even during years when the weather is capricious.

“I must be stronger than I look.” “All women are,”

All of the trees in their study were identically adapted, but the early bud-setters remembered their cold seedhoods, even though they were consistently ill served by this nostalgia. We don’t know exactly how this memory works. We think it is the sum total of several complex biochemical reactions and interactions. Researchers also don’t know exactly how the human memory works. They think it is the sum total of several complex biochemical reactions and interactions.

The combination of freedom and love is a potent one, and it made me more productive than ever.

“Oh, I’m not worried about him,” returned Bill. “He’s gone. It’s not any more complicated than that. Honestly, if I admit it, it’s me that I feel bad for.” He walked away from me and looked out toward the south. “There’s nothing like having a parent die to make you realize how alone you are in the world,” he added.

Upon 20× magnification the fronds resemble Oscar the Grouch’s pubic hair,” Bill wrote in our field notes using his careful script). We were only partly convinced of its species (rutabulum was the front-runner), and so we settled upon Brachythecium oscarpubes for the time being.

Nevertheless, here on this sunny day, I can’t resist my temptation to put a message in a bottle: Somebody remember. Somebody someday find my granddaughter and tell her. Tell her about the day that one of her grandmothers sat looking out of her kitchen window with a pen in her hand. Tell her that her grandmother didn’t see the dirty dishes or the dust on the windowsill because she was busy deciding. Tell her that in the end, she decided to go ahead and love her granddaughter several decades too early. Tell her about the day that her grandmother sat in a sunbeam and dreamed of her to the soundtrack of a tree being flogged.

He looked at me as if he wanted to ask more questions, but he also understands that pretending that things are true is often more fun than knowing that they are false.

It looks as if the bigger potatoes of the future might feed more people while nourishing them less. I don’t have an answer for that one.

My job is about making sure there will be some evidence that someone cared about the great tragedy that unfolded during our age.

Every single year, at least one tree is cut down in your name. Here’s my personal request to you: If you own any private land at all, plant one tree on it this year. If you are renting a place with a yard, plant a tree in it and see if your landlord notices. If he does, insist to him that it was always there. Throw in a bit about how exceptional he is for caring enough about the environment to have put it there. If he takes the bait, go plant another one. Baffle some chicken wire at its base and string a cheesy birdhouse around its tiny trunk to make it look permanent, then move out and hope for the best.