Lab Girl

by Hope Jahren

my father taught me how to preemptively take things apart and study how they work, so that as they inevitably failed I’d be able to restore them. He taught me that there is no shame in breaking something, only in not being able to fix it.

I discovered how the world is mostly populated by strangers.

My great-grandparents, like practically everybody else’s in that town, had come to Minnesota as part of a mass emigration from Norway that began in about 1880. And like everybody else in my hometown, this is pretty much all that I knew about my ancestors. I suspected that they hadn’t relocated to the coldest place on Earth and then taken up disemboweling pigs because things were going well in Europe, but it had never occurred to me to ask for the story.

My laboratory is like a church because it is where I figure out what I believe. The machines drone a gathering hymn as I enter. I know whom I’ll probably see, and I know how they’ll probably act. I know there’ll be silence; I know there’ll be music, a time to greet my friends, and a time to leave others to their contemplation. There are rituals that I follow, some I understand and some I don’t. Elevated to my best self, I strive to do each task correctly. My lab is a place to go on sacred days, as is a church. On holidays, when the rest of the world is closed, my lab is open. My lab is a refuge and an asylum. It is my retreat from the professional battlefield; it is the place where I coolly examine my wounds and repair my armor. And, just like church, because I grew up in it, it is not something from which I can ever really walk away.

I know damn well that if there had been a way to get to success without traveling through disaster someone would have already done it

science for war will always pay better than science for knowledge.

No writer in the world agonizes over words the way a scientist does. Terminology is everything: we identify something by its established name, describe it using the universally agreed-upon terms, study it in a completely individual way, and then write about it using a code that takes years to master. When documenting our work, we “hypothesize” but never “guess”; we “conclude,” not just “decide.” We view the word “significant” to be so vague that it is useless but know that the addition of “highly” can signify half a million dollars of funding.

When you are in the forest, for every tree that you see, there are at least a hundred more trees waiting in the soil, alive and fervently wishing to be.

Every replete tree was first a seed that waited.

“Just let me know if you get stuck or have any questions.” I started to leave, but hesitated when Bill looked up at last. He sighed. “Actually, I do have a question. Why aren’t those morons over there done already? This is like the hundredth hole we’ve looked at. How long does it take someone to learn to spot a fucking earthworm?” I shook my head in corroboration and shrugged. “I guess their eye hath not seen, nor ear heard.” Bill looked at me for ten seconds. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I shrugged again. “How should I know? It’s from the Bible. You’re not supposed to know what it means. Nobody does.”

In a wide, wide world, full of unimaginable numbers of people, I was—in addition to being small and insufficient—special.

That whole summer in Colorado was a data-gathering bust, but it taught me the most important thing I know about science: that experiments are not about getting the world to do what you want it to do. While tending to my wounds that fall, I shaped a new and better goal out of the debris of the disaster. I would study plants in a new way—not from the outside, but from the inside. I would figure out why they did what they did and try to understand their logic, which must serve me better than simply defaulting to my own, I decided.

“It takes a long time to turn into what you’re supposed to be.”

Because—as Marge Piercy first said—both life and love are like butter and do not keep: they both have to be made fresh every day.

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.

“Well, rainbows are self-centered fuckers who need to get over themselves.”

“Well, you know what they say about Hell,” I remarked while adding the drill to our pile. “The ambiance is bad, but the company is actually pretty good.”

When I am pressed, I resort to these two sentences: You shouldn’t take this job too seriously. Except for when you should.