By: Bill Hopkins —
People are like plants: they grow toward the light. I chose science because science gave me what I needed–a home as defined in the most literal sense: a safe place to be.
Lab Girl by Hope Jahren is actually two books in one. Every other chapter is a little treatise on plants or trees. And then the other half of the chapters is the author’s autobiography. Hope Jahren is currently geochemist and geobiologist at the University of Oslo in Norway, known for her work using stable isotope analysis to analyze fossil forests dating to the Eocene.
The autobiography begins with her childhood in a small midwestern town, where she loved to play in her science teacher father’s lab in the evenings. Her mother taught her an uncompromising drive to excel. Plus, English literature. Her mother was completing her college degree by correspondence course, and Hope helped out, learning to read using the classics. When she started kindergarten, she learned another thing from her teacher, “Tiny but determined, I navigated the confusing and unstable path of being what you are while knowing that it’s more than people want to see.”
Learning to read on difficult passages of Chaucer was a good thing. The quality of the writing in this book is exceptional. She not only writes well, she spins some good yarns. The autobiographical chapters have one good story after another. She began as an English major as an undergraduate but switched to science, went to grad school at UC Berkeley, to her first job at Georgia Tech, on to Johns Hopkins and finally to University of Hawaii. Most of the stories take place in the college laboratory, or on field trips. They are also about a young person finding her place in the world, and overcoming difficulties.
This is also the story of Bill, an undergrad she meets in Berkeley, whom she describes as the world’s greatest lab partner and her best friend. Bill becomes a lifetime friend, following her as a lab assistant through all her career changes, and a character in most of her stories.
This is a great book for anyone to read, but should be of special interest to young women interested in an academic career in the sciences. And actually, you could just read the chapters on plant science, and it would still be a good book.
My only criticism is that the book is too short. After finishing it I immediately looked for another book by the author and I found The Story of More, about climate change. It’s a different kind of book altogether, but equally good in its own way. Check it out after you have read Lab Girl.