Lab Girl

by Hope Jahren

She saw her own rags-to-relative-riches life story as a hard-fought victory over something evil, decided that her children should keep fighting in order to deserve its legacy, and proceeded to toughen us for a struggle that never came.

I navigated the confusing and unstable path of being what you are while knowing that it’s more than people want to see.

Being mother and daughter has always felt like an experiment that we just can’t get right.

The very attributes that rendered me a nuisance to all of my previous teachers—my inability to let things go coupled with my tendency to overdo everything—were exactly what my science professors liked to see.

My lab is a place where my guilt over what I haven’t done is supplanted by all of the things that I am getting done.

My lab is a place where I can be the child that I still am.

Science is an institution so singularly convinced of its own value that it cannot bear to throw anything away.

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.

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.