Lab Girl

I was urged many times to read Hope Jahren's book Lab Girl. I found a copy in a Little Free Library a few years ago, and because I'm planning to read her more recent book The Story of More for a book group soon, I thought I would read Lab Girl while waiting to get the newer book.

Jahren is described on the back of the book as a geobiologist, and after reading it I'm still a bit unsure what kind of scientist she is. She started out as a soil scientist, but she's also been a paleobiologist, and the bio says she "has spent her life studying trees."

She began life in southern Minnesota, and did her undergrad at the University of Minnesota before her Ph.D. at Berkeley. The early part about working at the U of Mn hospital pharmacy lab around 1990 is particularly interesting. (I was in grad school at the U at the time, though I never used the hospital.)

Overall, the book is a bildungsroman of her life as a scientist, which is enjoyable, though I'm a bit puzzled by the raves I heard about it.

I got more out of the shorter, interwoven chapters about plants, and appreciate the book's bifurcated structure. Those chapters have a lot of insight into the plants she discusses and, often, connect beyond the specific plants to insights about life more broadly. Here are a couple of examples.

From the chapter on vines:

A vine's only weakness is its weakness. It desperately wants to grow as tall as a tree but it doesn't have the stiffness necessary to do it politely. A vine finds its way to the sun using not wood, but pure grit and undiluted gall....

Vines are not sinister; they are just hopelessly ambitious. They are the hardest working plants on Earth. A vine can grow an entire footing length on just one sunny day. Within their stems gush the highest rates of water transfer ever measured in a plant (pages 126–127).

From the epilogue:

Human civilization has reduced the plant, a four-hundred-million-year-old life form, into three things: food, medicine, and wood. In our relentless and ever-intensifying obsession with obtaining higher volume, potency, and variety of these three things, we have devastated plant ecology to an extent that millions of years of natural disaster could not (page 279).

Overall, I liked Lab Girl well enough and can recommend it. At the same time, I'm looking to The Story of More for a more focused narrative, still with great morsels from Jahren's research and years of experience.