Lab Girl by
Hope Jahren
My rating:
4 of 5 stars
Sometimes your life story is defined as much by the paths you did not take as the ones you did. I felt a kinship with Jahren simply over her enthusiasm for plants. I was a Biology graduate and I loved my botany classes. Jahren understands my marvel over the miracle of a seed landing in the right soil, with the right sun and water balance to make it grow. A seed can be less than an inch away from a seedling, but lay dormant because the right microclimate doesn’t exist. Jahren writes about all of that and more that makes plants some of the most amazing and tantalizing organisms on earth. And she does it in an interesting and understandable way. Each chapter is alternated between an essay on plants—all gold—and memoirs of her life. Perhaps tellingly, either of me or of Jahren I don’t know, the essays on plants were much more intriguing to me. Still, I enjoyed much of her life as well if only because it made me recall fondly the time I spent out in the field. The relationships formed around the search for knowledge is unique, deep, and can be truly plutonic. There were definitely some tedious parts (how to keep a saline bag sterile); some annoying parts (we get it, scientists are poor); and some weird parts (hair in a tree?) but overall I enjoyed this virtual tour of a path I didn’t take.
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The embryo that became my tree sat on the ground for years, caught between the danger of waiting too long and the danger of leaving the seed too early. Any mistake would surely have led to death, and to being swallowed up by a seething, unforgiving world capable of rotting even the strongest leaf in a matter of days.
the grown-up trees presented a future that was as stultifying as it was interminable. Nothing but fifty, eighty, maybe a hundred years of just trying not to fall down,
The adults grew a bit thicker around the middle each year, with little else to show for the passing decades.
Something so hard can be so easy if you just have a little help. In the right place, under the right conditions, you can finally stretch out into what you’re supposed to be.
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.
Helpless and impotent against the awesome power of Death, we nonetheless bowed our heads in the pharmacy, injected twenty milliliters of salvation into a bag of tears, blessed it again and again, and then carried it like a baby to the hospice and offered it up.
Humans are actively creating a world where only weeds can live and then feigning shock and outrage upon finding so many.
A CACTUS DOESN’T LIVE in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn’t killed it yet.
They further hypothesized that the VOC must have traveled at least a mile and was sensed as a distress signal by the other trees, which then preemptively fortified their leaves with caterpillar poison. Through the 1980s, generation after generation of caterpillars died miserable, starving deaths due to these poisons. By playing this long game, the trees ultimately turned the tide of the war.
Plants do not travel through space as we do: as a rule they do not move from place to place. Instead they travel through time, enduring one event after the other, and in this sense, winter is a particularly long trip.
Multiple light experiments have shown that the changing “photoperiod” is what triggers the tree to harden; it can be triggered in July if we fool the tree using artificial light. 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.
What if this moss had moved into an area, deemed it not wet enough, and proceeded to change this high ground into the soggy mess it preferred, causing what was previously heterogeneous to evolve into a uniformly green expanse?
Many of the same things that control our decisions regarding what we do with new resources, it turns out. Our genes limit our possibilities; our environment makes some courses of action wiser than others; some of us are inherently conservative with our earnings; some are prone to gambling; even our fertility status might be considered when evaluating a new plan for investing.
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.
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