Lab Girl: A Memoir About Plants, Science And Life
No risk is more terrifying than that taken by the first root. A lucky root will eventually find water, but its first job is to anchor- to anchor an embryo and forever end it’s mobile phase, however, passive that mobility was.
Lab Girl is the memoir of Hope Jahren, a scientist who works at the intersection of botany and paleontology. The book traces her life from a childhood spent playing in the college lab her father supervised to setting up three laboratories that each carried her name. She was born into a family of Scandinavian descent in a town in Minnesota known for its harsh winters and the meat processing factory, where her college professor father taught her to maintain lab equipment and her mother developed in her a love for English literature. University, to her, was just a way to escape the town famous for its meat processing factory, but once she got there, she took up a job in a blood bank attached to a hospital and shifted majors from Literature to Science. She talks of the challenges she faced as a woman in science, and of how she employed every trick she could to set up and maintain her own laboratory. The book gives you deep insights into how scientists literally live from one grant to another, and of how there is never enough money to fund all the scientific research that needs to be done and can be done. She is candid about the additional challenges that a woman in science faces- of how much she needs to push herself forward, and of how the system constantly pushes her back (you are almost tempted to shake up the system when she gets banned from entering her own laboratory while pregnant).
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 seat that waited.
The most powerful part of the memoir is her friendship with Bill who she met when he was an undergrad and she was completing her PhD- without him by her side, it is unlikely she would have achieved as much as she did. Theirs was a friendship between two misfits, a friendship built on deep respect, affection, a similar disregard for conventions and a common quest for pushing the boundaries of science in very similar ways. While her friendship with Bill forms the soul of the book, what is missing is the other relationships in her life. She talks of her father and her mother, both of whom in their own way did a lot for her, but they simply drop out of her life once she moves out of Minnesota. She doesn’t talk much about her husband either- she tells us that it was a quick courtship and marriage, but the descriptions are almost transactional. While she does talk a little more about herself as a mother (than she does of herself as a wife or daughter) it is nowhere as much as one would want or expect. At times it almost seems like all the relationships in her life are told from the perspective of how it impacts her friendship with Bill!
Every oak leaf on earth is a unique embellishment of a single, rough and incomplete blueprint.
One chapter in the book is devoted to her illness (she is bipolar) something she had not referred to at all till that point, but which in retrospect was evident, because many of the incidents she described were clearly from when she was at the manic phase. The level of vulnerability she is willing to display while talking about her pregnancy is one that will give hope to many others who are in her place.
It takes a tree only a week to discard its entire life’s work, cast off like a dress barely worn but too unfashionable for further use. Can you imagine throwing away all of your possessions once a year because you are secure in your expectation that you will be able to replace them in a matter of weeks?
Where the book absolutely shines is in its descriptions of plants and the plant world. While we are aware of the functions performed by plants, she adds a fresh dimension to it by humanising the actions. She also draws parallels between what happens in the plant world with what was happening in her own life. After reading this book, it will be impossible to look at a plant in exactly the same way ever again.
It is apparently from her work that she is deeply committed to understanding the climate crisis. When she describes how you can recreate the climate conditions by looking at the rings of old trees, or the way the soil is laid out, you start to better appreciate the delicate balance in nature, and of how even the smallest actions can affect it.
This is what it must feel like to visit your sons room after he leaves for college: the beginnings of his life left haphazardly behind, irrelevant to him but still precious to you
That she started out as a literature major is evident from the beauty of her prose. She coaxes music out of words, and you want to bookmark many of her passages so you can keep savouring them. In a lesser writer, the use of appropriate quotations could become tedious, but in her case they come out so spontaneously that you do not think they are forced.
Anyone who loves the plant world would love this book, as would anyone who is interested in reading memoirs of women in science. I certainly look forward to reading the other books written by the author.
I have accepted that. I don’t know all the things that I ought to know, but I do know the things that I need to know. I don’t know how to say I love you, but I do know how to show it. The people who love me know the same.
[I bought this book, and the opinions are entirely mine. I also published the review in YouthKiAwaaaz]
