Lab Girl

by Hope Jahren

Our fascination with C-6 was not a scientifically legitimate experiment, we never officially “wrote it up” for anything, and yet that small plant growing in a Dixie Cup changed my thinking more than anything I had read within my dog-eared textbooks. I had to conclude that C-6 did things—not just because he was programmed to do so, but also for reasons known only to him. He could move his “arm” from one side of his “body” to the other; he just did it about 22,000 times slower than I could move mine. His clock and my own were forever out of sync, a simple fact that had placed an untraversable canyon between us. While it seemed that I experienced everything, he appeared to me to passively do nothing. Perhaps, however, to him I was just buzzing around as a blur and, like the electron within an atom, exhibited too much random motion to register as alive.