Lab Girl

by Hope Jahren

The more I handled things and learned their names and uses, the more joyous and confident grew my sense of kinship with the rest of the world. —Helen Keller

Just as I reached the peak of my disenchantment, one of my professors offered me a long-term work-study position in his research laboratory, and all at once I was assured of the money that I needed to keep me in college until I got my degree. So I quit my hospital job and gave up on saving other people’s lives. Instead, I started working in a research laboratory in order to save my own life.

I would take a long, lonely journey toward adulthood with the dogged faith of the pioneer who has realized that there is no promised land but still holds out hope that the destination will be someplace better than here.

In my mind it is 1860, and I see a ragged cohort of men stumble upon a living root while they are digging more than one hundred feet belowground. I see them stand gaping in the fetid air, slowly overcoming their disbelief that this root could somehow be attached to some tree that is growing far above them. In fact, both parties registered their disbelief that day: the acacia tree was also undoubtedly surprised to find its roots exposed from the rock that confined it, and produced a flood of hormones in response, first locally and then eventually diffusing through every cell of its being. When those men moved soil and rock in order to form an unprecedented path between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, they found a daring plant that had made an unprecedented path of its own. They found an acacia tree that had moved soil and rock, through years of dry failure until its improbable success.

In my mind, in 1860, I see the men congratulate each other and gather around the root long enough to take a photograph with it. And then I picture them chopping it in half.

SCIENTISTS TAKE CARE of their own to the extent that they are able. When my undergraduate professors saw my sincere interest in their research laboratories, they advised me to continue on for a Ph.D. I applied for entrance to the most famous universities that I had ever heard of, giddy in the knowledge that if accepted, I’d get not only free tuition but also a stipend that would just cover rent and food for the duration of my enrollment. This is how Ph.D. training in science and engineering generally works—as long as your thesis also furthers the goals of a federally funded project, you are supported at a sort of academic subsistence level. The day after the University of Minnesota conferred upon me a bachelor’s degree cum laude, I dumped off my winter clothes in a big pile at the Salvation Army on Lake Street, took Hiawatha Avenue south to Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport, and flew to San Francisco. After I got to Berkeley, I didn’t so much meet Bill. It was more like I identified him.

Consider that there can easily be a hundred thousand lobed leaves on a single oak tree and that no two of them are exactly the same; in fact, some are easily twice as big as others. Every oak leaf on Earth is a unique embellishment of a single rough and incomplete blueprint. The leaves of the world comprise countless billion elaborations of a single, simple machine designed for one job only—a job upon which hinges humankind. Leaves make sugar.

Plants are the only things in the universe that can make sugar out of nonliving inorganic matter.

Without a constant supply of glucose to your brain, you will die. Period. Under duress, your liver can make glucose out of protein or fat—but that protein or fat was originally constructed from a plant sugar within some other animal. It’s inescapable: at this very moment, ...

Probably within just the last ten million years, a plant had a new idea, and instead of spreading its leaf out, it shaped it into a spine, such as those we find today on the cholla cactus. It was this new idea that allowed a new kind of plant to grow preposterously large and live long in a dry place where it was also the only green thing around to eat for miles—an absurdly inconceivable success. One new idea allowed the plant to see a new world and draw sweetness out of a whole new sky.

When a lab experiment just won’t work, moving heaven and earth often won’t make it work—and, similarly, there are some experiments that you just can’t screw up even if you try. The readout from the x-ray displayed one clear, unequivocal peak at exactly the same angle of diffraction each time I replicated the measurement.

The long, low, broad swoop of ink was totally unlike the stiff, jerky spikes that my advisor and I thought we might see, and it clearly indicated that my mineral was an opal. I stood and stared at the readout, knowing that there was no way I had—or anybody could have—possibly misinterpreted the result. It was opal and this was something I knew, something I could draw a circle around and testify to as being true. While looking at the graph, I thought about how I now knew something for certain that only an hour ago had been an absolute unknown, and I slowly began to appreciate how my life had just changed.

A single howler monkey sat high on a branch in the back, wailing out the entire Book of Job in his native tongue while periodically raising his arms in an age-old supplication for an explanation as to why the righteous must suffer.

An exhausted cadre of capuchins paced the perimeter, compulsively checking and rechecking the empty feeding troughs for the raisin that they were certain was right there a minute ago.

Our tree’s only source of energy is the sun: after light photons stimulate the pigments within the leaf, buzzing electrons line up into an unfathomably long chain and pass their excitement one to the other, moving biochemical energy across the cell to the exact location where it is needed. The plant pigment chlorophyll is a large molecule, and within the bowl of its spoon-shaped structure sits one single precious magnesium atom. The amount of magnesium needed for enough chlorophyll to fuel thirty-five pounds of leaves is equivalent to the amount of magnesium found in fourteen One A Day vitamins, and it must ultimately dissolve out of bedrock, which is a geologically slow process. Magnesium, phosphorous, iron, and the many other micronutrients that our tree needs can be gained only from the extremely dilute solution that flows in between the tiny mineral grains within the soil. In order to accumulate all of the soil nutrients that thirty-five pounds of leaves require, our tree must first absorb and then evaporate at least eight thousand gallons of water from the soil. That’s enough to fill a tanker truck. That’s enough to keep twenty-five people alive for a year. That’s enough to make you worry about when it is next going to rain.

The NSF is a U.S. government agency, and the money that it provides for scientific research comes from tax dollars. In 2013, the budget of the NSF was $7.3 billion. For comparison, the federal budget allocation for the Department of Agriculture—the people responsible for supervising food imports and exports—was about three times that amount. Each year, the U.S. government spends twice as much on its space program as it does on all of its other scientists put together: NASA’s 2013 budget was more than $17 billion. And these discrepancies are nothing compared with the disparity between research and military spending. The Department of Homeland Security, created in response to the events of September 11, 2001, commands an annual budget that is fully five times larger than that of the entire NSF, while the Department of Defense’s mere “discretionary” budget comes to more than sixty times that sum.

For the last thirty years, the amount of the U.S. annual budget that goes to non-defense-related research has been frozen. From a purely budgetary perspective, we don’t have too few scientists, we’ve got far too many, and we keep graduating more each year. America may say that it values science, but it sure as hell doesn’t want to pay for it. Within environmental science in particular, we see the crippling effects that come from having been resource-hobbled for decades: degrading farmland, species extinction, progressive deforestation…The list goes on and on.

Next time you meet a science professor, ask her if she ever worries that her findings might be wrong. If she worries that she chose an impossible problem to study, or that she overlooked some important evidence along the way. If she worries that one of the many roads not taken was perhaps the road to the right answer that she’s still looking for. Ask a science professor what she worries about. It won’t take long. She’ll look you in the eye and say one word: “Money.”

Humans are actively creating a world where only weeds can live and then feigning shock and outrage upon finding so many. This mixed message is irrelevant: there is already a revolution taking place in the plant world as invasives effortlessly supplant natives within every human-modified space. Our impotent condemnation of weeds will not stop this revolution. We aren’t getting the revolution we want: we’re getting the one that we triggered.

A CACTUS DOESN’T LIVE in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn’t killed it yet. Any plant that you find growing in the desert will grow a lot better if you take it out of the desert.

“Listen, you’re never going to be friends with the students, so just get that through your head right now,” Bill sighed. “You and I are going to work our asses off, teach them shit over and over, risk our fucking lives for them, and they are going to unfailingly disappoint us. That’s the job. That’s what we both get paid for.” “You’re right.” I played into his cynicism, but only halfheartedly. “We don’t really believe that, do we?” “No, we don’t,” Bill admitted.

Our work turned out to be some of the first analyses of carbon-13 within ancient terrestrial rocks, and though I was able to finish the lab work in less than two years, it ended up taking me six full years to interpret the data and finally publish my findings. Thus my early years as a professor were spent trying to persuade the world that I had used an unusual method on unorthodox samples to gain a surprising result via an untested interpretation. The whole thing had come out of left field, and I was naive in thinking that I could win over audiences who had decades more research credibility than I did. My early career had all the makings of a long, slow academic train wreck.

As I spent those early years repeatedly smashing against a brick wall of scholarly skepticism, my bewilderment ripened into the realization that it would take me many conferences, much correspondence, and a great deal of intellectual soul-searching to successfully convince a critical mass of other scientists that I knew what I was doing.

Bill regarded his destitution as a novel adventure—a temporary bohemian phase—but it lost its meager charms as the months dragged on. Throughout the time he was homeless, my small gestures, such as cooking him dinner every night, were enough to offset much of my guilt, but lately it had become clear that I was ruining both of our lives.

The nightmare of losing the lab was all the more horrifying because it had been my only concrete dream. During my college years I had latched on to the idea that once I was a bona fide scholar (the main manifestation of that idea being a laboratory with my name on the door), everyone would acknowledge my credibility, some scientific breakthrough would logically follow, and life would be easy. I had raced through graduate school secure in my expectation of this reward. Thus I was bewildered by my failure during these early years of professorship and deeply worried, for the first time, that my cosmic destiny would go unfulfilled and the faith of my frustrated foremothers—whom I always pictured scrubbing bedclothes while up to their elbows in lye—had been wasted on me.

Didn’t Stephen’s innate sense of self-preservation thwart his martyrdom at all? When someone throws a stone at your head, don’t you instinctively dodge it? Put your arms up? Or do you close your eyes and let it happen, waiting for a good hard smack to the temple? And where did the stones come from anyway, when they stoned people? Did people collect them on the way to the scene? About how many stones did each thrower figure that he needed? Did they examine each one they picked up, discarding and retaining them based on some criterion? Did women get to throw too, or did they just simper on the periphery, as depicted by Raphael? I thought about Saul, the elder who oversaw the whole grisly affair, and how he eventually came around to Stephen’s way of thinking and gained no small amount of celebrity roaming the empire and espousing it, but only after Stephen was good and dead.

Everything about it was ridiculous, from its fourteen-point Palatino font to the unfortunate fact that some of the pages had been shuffled in upside down prior to binding. While we waited out my insomnia, I read a three-page paragraph of Marcie’s nonsense and followed it with a section of Finnegans Wake. Then I asked Bill to identify which one was which and to justify his determination through critical analysis. The night before, I had compared and contrasted the “Methods” section of The Book of Marcie with the famous “Lucky’s Think” monologue from Waiting for Godot.

Love and learning are similar in that they can never be wasted. I left Atlanta knowing more than I had when I arrived. To this day, I need only close my eyes to summon the smell of a crushed sweet gum leaf, as pungent as if I were holding it in my hand. Point to any object in my laboratory, and I can tell you how much I paid for it down to the penny, and which company sells the cheapest version. I can explain the theory of hydraulic lift so that every single student in the room understands it on the first go-round. I know that there is more deuterium in soilwater from Louisiana than there is in soilwater from Mississippi, although I am only about halfway done figuring out why.

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.

Ed’s suggestion that the Earth’s ocean chemistry could be reset completely was a dangerous idea when he was young, and he had stayed up nights to study while the people he knew were watching Joe DiMaggio and arguing about the McCarthy trials. Forty years later his idea was one that I could take for granted as I dared my way into my own ambiguous future. It was kind of tragic, I reflected, that we all spent our lives working but never really got good at our work, or even finished it. The purpose instead was for me to stand on the rock that he had thrown into the rushing river, bend and claw another rock from the bottom, and then cast it down a bit further and hope it would be a useful next step for some person with whom Providence might allow me to cross paths.

I would keep our beakers, thermometers, and electrodes in my care, hoping against hope that not all of it would be garbage upon my own retirement.

Remaining stationary and naked outside in the below-freezing weather for three months is a death sentence for almost every living thing on Earth, except for the many species of trees that have been doing it for a hundred million years or more. Spruce, pine, birch, and the other species that blanket Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia, and Russia endure up to six months of frozen weather each year. It may not surprise you to learn that the whole trick of survival is not freezing to death.

Animal cells can tolerate frozen temperatures for short periods of time because they are constantly burning sugar to produce energy in the form of heat. Plants, in contrast, make sugar, taking in energy in the form of light. If the sun is not strong enough to keep the air above freezing, then the tree is not kept above freezing either. The Earth’s rotation is such that the North Pole tilts away from the sun for part of each year, reducing the amount of heat that is supplied to the high latitudes, and this is what causes winter in the Northern Hemisphere.

Ice is a three-dimensional crystal of molecules, and freezing requires a nucleation spot—some chemical aberration upon which the pattern may start to build. Pure water devoid of any such site may be “super-cooled” to forty degrees below zero and still remain an ice-free liquid. It is in this “hardened” state, with some cells packed full of chemicals and others sectioned off for purity, that a tree embarks on its winter journey, standing unmoved through the frost, sleet, and blizzards of the season. These trees do not grow during winter; they merely stand and ride planet Earth to the other side of the sun, where the North Pole will finally be tilted toward the heat source and the tree will experience summer.

The vast majority of northern trees prepare well for their wintertime journey, and death due to frost damage is extremely rare.

Unlike the overall character of winter, which may be mild one year and punishing the next, the pattern of how light changes through the autumn is exactly the same every year.

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. These plants know that when your world is changing rapidly, it is important to have identified the one thing that you can always count upon.

“Naw,” I assured him. “Look at those guys. I’m going to do this job for thirty more years, work as hard as any of them, accomplish just as much or more, and not one of them will ever look me straight in the eye like I belong here.”

A manic-depressive pregnant woman cannot take Depakote or Tegretol or Seroquel or lithium or Risperdal or any of the other things that she’s been taking on a daily basis for years in order to keep herself from hearing voices and banging her head against the wall. Once her pregnancy is confirmed she must cease all medications quickly (another known trigger) and stand on the train tracks just waiting for the locomotive to hit. The statistics are pretty simple: a bipolar woman is seven times as likely to experience a major episode while pregnant, compared with before or after. Leaving her to ride it out without medication for the first two trimesters is the cruel reality upon which doctors insist. Early in the pregnancy I wake up and vomit violently until I collapse onto the bathroom floor and lie there for hours, retching and crying in exhaustion until finally, in desperation, I begin to hit my head against the walls and the floor, trying to knock myself out.

Twenty-six weeks is a magic date: it ushers in the third trimester, a period of advanced fetal development for which the Food and Drug Administration has approved the use of a whole series of antipsychotic drugs to address the health of the mother. As soon as it is medically advisable, I am put on this and that and the other medication regimen, and then slowly my more florid symptoms begin to come under control.

One morning during my eighth month, I trudge through the front door of the building and stop to rest in the front office while mentally preparing to drag this extra thirty pounds down to my laboratory in the basement. I don’t handle any chemicals, of course, but it comforts me to sit next to the humming machines and examine the readouts as they are produced, and pretend that the instruments need my approval and encouragement in order to continue with each next task.

In frustration I grab my empty coffee cup and hurl it to the floor with all my might. It bounces on the carpet and does not break but instead rocks itself into a smug and leisurely sideways pose. In it I see yet more evidence of my powerlessness, even over things small and meaningless, and I sit down, put my head in my hands, and sob onto my desk.

There these medical students are, on the other side of a heavy iron door that has been locked against me, and instead of glorying within the inner sanctum, they seem to be throwing it all away. I then proceed to wonder indignantly why these little bastards think they are even fit to measure my cervix. My rage awakens a bit of the old me, and in my head I edit the version of these events that I will relate to Bill, and here insert myself yelling: “Write it down, motherfuckers; I’m going to be on the test!”

Now my son and I are side by side, and one team of people is holding and helping him and another team of people is holding and helping me, and we are all covered in my blood, and both of us are just fine. I need do nothing but lie luxuriously and passively marvel at my baby next to me, as it seems as if every single worker in the hospital is busily employed in swabbing the two of us, cleaning us, and checking every single part of both of us again and again. Every detail is being written down and recorded on multiple charts and readouts because we all agree that this data is far too precious to ever be lost or forgotten. Once my team has stopped my bleeding, they massage a bucketful of now-useless placental chum out of my abdomen while the other team brings my washed and wrapped baby to me for a kiss. “You just had a completely healthy nine-pound baby,” says a young nurse with a smile.

And so I lie in bed and feel what I don’t need come out of me. A steady ooze of bloody, amorphous clots slides out of me for days and with it flows all the guilt and regret and fear that I have carried, and while I sleep, people stronger than I am silently take it all away and dispose of it properly. When I wake, I hold my baby and I think about how he is my second opal that I can forever draw a circle around and point to as being mine.

Bill surprises us by visiting the hospital and hugs me for the first and only time in eleven years, and I am amazed to see how easily and willingly he settles into the role of beloved uncle.

we think of all the water on Earth as an Olympic-sized swimming pool, the amount that’s available to plants within the soil would fill less than one soda bottle. Trees require so much water—more than a gallon is needed to build a handful of leaves—that it is tempting to envision the roots as actively sucking the soil. But the reality is quite different: the roots of a tree are absolutely passive. Water flows passively into the roots during the day and passively out of them at night, faithful as the tides of the ocean drawn by the moon. Root tissue functions like a sponge: when placed dry upon spilled milk, it will automatically expand to draw the fluid in. If we then move this full sponge onto dry cement, we will soon see the fluid drawn back out, making a wet spot on the sidewalk. Digging down into any soil, we find it wetter as we travel toward the bedrock. A mature tree gets most of its water through its taproot, which is the root that extends straight down. Tree roots located near the surface grow laterally to form a netted support structure that prevents the tree from falling over.

Mature maple trees passively redistribute water taken from depth up and out of their shallow roots all night long. The small plants living near these big trees have been shown to rely upon this recycled water for more than half of their needs.

95 percent of the trees that make it to their first birthday will not make it to their second.

Each night beneath the ground, the most precious resource of all—water—moves up from the strong and out toward the weak, such that the sapling might live to fight another day. This water is not everything the sapling requires, but it must help a little, and the sapling needs all the help it can get if one hundred years from now there is still to be a maple tree defending this same plot of land. No parent can make life perfect for its offspring, but we are all moved to provide for them as best we can.