Lab Girl

by Hope Jahren

Every spruce does the same thing each autumn: they perform a “bud set,” where they stop growing in anticipation of the first frost. The Norwegian scientists have observed that among hundreds of genetically identical trees, grown from seedling to adult side by side in the forest, the trees that had been embryos under a cold climate invariably set their buds two to three weeks earlier than do their counterparts, anticipating a longer, colder winter. 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.

Of the many million seeds dropped on every acre of the Earth’s surface each year, less than 5 percent will begin to grow. Of those, only 5 percent will survive to their first birthday. Given these realities, the first and foremost experiment in each tree research study—growing a sapling—is actually an ill-omened fight with near-certain failure. Thus the initial planting of seedlings at the start of a forestry study represents a weary victory won by a stoic researcher with a strong sense of fatalism.

I am learning their mind-set as I am learning the substages of embryonic development, and both appeal to me. We plant tiny trees during the night so that they may be baptized with morning dew, and sustain our faith that their measurement will yield knowledge to our scientific heirs, some two hundred years from now.

Since moving to Hawaii, I’ve learned that palm trees are not really trees: they are something different. Inside their trunks you won’t find hard wood growing outward, new tissue added ring by ring. Instead you’ll find a jumble of spongy tissue, scattered instead of arranged. This lack of conventional structure is what gives the palm its flexibility and makes it supremely adapted to my son’s favorite hobby, as well as to the gentle island breezes that periodically coalesce into ruthless hurricanes.

There are thousands of different palm species, and they all belong to the Arecaceae family. The Arecaceae are important because they were the first plant family to evolve as “monocots” about a hundred million years ago. The first real leaf of a monocot is a single blade, not a double sprout as in the “dicot” plants that came before.

The very earliest monocots soon evolved into grasses, and grasslands eventually spread across the vast areas of the Earth where it’s just a little too wet to be a desert and still a little too dry to be a forest. With some breeding help from humans, grasses were evolved into grains. And today, just three monocot species—rice, corn, and wheat—provide the ultimate sustenance for seven billion people.

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.

Our son was successfully in bed at exactly nine o’clock, but not before I handed him a small vial of wheatgrass juice while he prepared to brush his teeth. “Drink this first,” I commanded. “If you dare,” I added. His eyes widened. “You did it!” he said with awe, and then drank it down while wincing over its bitter taste. For weeks he had been begging me to make a potion that would turn him into a tiger. “Make it in your lab,” he had directed me. “Make it out of plants.”

After a pause he closed his eyes and asked, “Am I a tiger yet?” I looked him up and down slowly, and then answered, “No.” “Why not?” he asked. “Because it takes a long time,” I answered. “Why does it take a long time?” he pursued. “Why? I don’t know,” I admitted, then added, “It takes a long time to turn into what you’re supposed to be.”

“It will work,” I confirmed. “It worked before.” “On who?” he said, intrigued. “On a little mammal named Hadrocodium,” I explained. “He lived almost two hundred million years ago and he spent most of his time hiding from the dinosaurs, who would step on him if he didn’t watch out. Do you remember the magnolia tree in front of the house where we lived when you were little-little?” I asked. “That tree out front was the great-great-great-great-and-more-grandchild of the first flower, which looked like it. It was just born as a brand-new kind of plant when Hadrocodium was running around. One day he ate some leaves from it, because his mom told him that it would make him as strong as a dinosaur. But it turned him into a tiger instead. It took a hundred and fifty million years, and a lot of trial and error, but she finally did turn into a tiger.”

“ ‘She’? You said it was a ‘he.’ The tiger is a boy.” “Why can’t the tiger be a girl?” I asked. My son explained the obvious. “Because it’s not.”

I went back into our son’s room to check that he was sleeping. I kissed him on the forehead and smiled because he had already gotten to the age where he doesn’t always let me kiss him when he is awake. I recited the Lord’s Prayer and my heart felt full.

I kissed my husband again, put on my backpack, and went outside to open the shed. I got out my bike and looked up through the warm, tropical sky, into the terminal coldness of space, and saw light that had been emitted years ago from unimaginably hot fires that were still burning on the other side of the galaxy. I put on my helmet and rode to the lab, ready to spend the rest of the night using the other half of my heart.

For the first time in my life, I feel tired. I remember fondly the long weekends of years past when I could work steadily for forty-eight hours, when each new data point reinvigorated me and recharged my mind in stochastic bursts that culminated periodically into new ideas. I still generate ideas, but they are richer and deeper and they come to me while I am sitting down. Such ideas are also much more likely to actually work. And so each morning, I pick up something green and look at it, and then I plant some more seeds.

Last spring, Bill and I were sifting through the aftermath of a big agricultural experiment up at the greenhouse. We had been growing sweet potatoes under the greenhouse gas levels predicted for the next several hundred years, the levels that we’re likely to see if we, as a society, do nothing about carbon emissions. The potatoes grew bigger as carbon dioxide increased. This was not a surprise. We also saw that these big potatoes were less nutritious, much lower in protein content, no matter how much fertilizer we gave them. This was a bit of a surprise. It is also bad news, because the poorest and hungriest nations of the world rely on sweet potatoes for a significant amount of dietary protein. 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.

The Hawaiian Islands are themselves more or less a string of greenhouses: plant growth conditions are excellent year-round, complete with daily showers that are more like routine watering events than like storms. I looked where Bill was pointing, up toward the jungled mountains, and saw a bright ribbon of rainbow stretching in a full arc across the sky. Its sharp focus made it all the more brazen and beautiful, and it was bracketed by a second rainbow, wider and fuzzier, a gentle halo supporting the confident blaze of the first. “Hey, it’s a double rainbow,” I marveled. “Goddamn right it’s a double rainbow,” Bill said.

People still puzzle over the two of us, Bill and me. Are we siblings? Soul mates? Comrades? Novitiates? Accomplices? We eat almost every meal together, our finances are mixed, and we tell each other everything. We travel together, work together, finish each other’s sentences, and have risked our lives for each other. I’m happily married with a family and Bill was an obvious precondition to all that, a brother whom I would never give up, part of the package. But people that I meet still seem to want a label for what is between us. Just as with the potatoes, I don’t have an answer for that one. I do us because us is what I know how to do.

Together we are building something that will fill our grandchildren’s grandchildren with awe, and while building we consult daily the crude instructions provided by our grandfathers’ grandfathers. As a tiny, living part of the scientific collective, I’ve sat alone countless nights in the dark, burning my metal candle and watching a foreign world with an aching heart.

Planet Earth is nearly a Dr. Seuss book made real: every year since 1990 we have created more than eight billion new stumps. If we continue to fell healthy trees at this rate, less than six hundred years from now, every tree on the planet will have been reduced to a stump. My job is about making sure there will be some evidence that someone cared about the great tragedy that unfolded during our age.

While you’re at it, would you carve Bill’s name into your tree as well? He’s told me a hundred times over that he’ll never read this book because it would be pointless. He says that if he ever gets at all interested in himself he can damn well sit down and remember the last twenty years without any help from me. I don’t have a good comeback for that one, but I’d like to think that the many parts of Bill that I’ve released to the wind belong somewhere, and over the years we’ve learned that the best way to give something a home is to make it part of a tree. My name is carved into a bunch of our lab equipment, so why shouldn’t Bill’s name be carved into a bunch of trees?

No words can describe the gratitude that a hopeful writer feels for the first known author who reads her work and then encourages her. For me, that person was Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. I can name no deeper comfort than the friendship of those who knew me as a child. Thank you, Connie Luhmann, for being my eyes when I needed you. I am also grateful to Heather Schmidt, Dan Shore, and Andy Elby, who after reading some, always came back and asked to read more.