I am not a scientist, but I loved this memoir about science.



Hope Jahren is a botanist who is passionate about her field. Lab Girl is a beautifully written book about her life — her childhood in Minnesota with taciturn parents; how she developed a love of trees and plants; her early experiences in laboratory work; the ongoing struggle to get research funding; her battle with anxiety and depression; the longtime friendship with her lab partner, Bill; and how she eventually met her spouse and becam

I am not a scientist, but I loved this memoir about science.



Hope Jahren is a botanist who is passionate about her field. Lab Girl is a beautifully written book about her life — her childhood in Minnesota with taciturn parents; how she developed a love of trees and plants; her early experiences in laboratory work; the ongoing struggle to get research funding; her battle with anxiety and depression; the longtime friendship with her lab partner, Bill; and how she eventually met her spouse and became a mother. (Warning to sensitive readers: there is a description of a difficult childbirth, and the scene made me so anxious I had to shut the book and take a short break.)



Jahren intersperses the chapters of her personal life with anecdotes about nature. A few of these "tree chapters" were great, but I sometimes grew impatient with the plant and soil lectures and wanted to get back to Jahren's story, which I found more compelling.



Overall, I truly enjoyed this book and would highly recommend it to anyone who appreciates a well-written memoir or who likes reading about the life of a scientist. If I ever get the opportunity to fund some research, I'm giving Jahren a call.



Favorite Quotes

"People will tell you that you have to know math to be a scientist, or physics or chemistry. They're wrong. That's like saying you have to know how to knit to be a housewife, or that you have to know Latin to study the Bible. Sure, it helps, but there will be time for that. What comes first is a question..."



"[My father] taught me that there is no shame in breaking something, only in not being able to fix it."



"The vast emotional distances between the individual members of a Scandinavian family are forged early and reinforced daily. Can you imagine growing up in a culture where you can never ask anyone anything about themselves? Where 'How are you?' is considered a personal question that one is not obligated to answer? Where you are trained to always wait for others to first mention what is troubling them, even as you are trained to never mention what is troubling you? It must be a survival skill left over from the old Viking days, when long silences were required to prevent unnecessary homicides during the long, dark winters when quarters were close and supplies were dwindling."



"[My mother] was always angry and I could never piece together why. With the self-focus peculiar to children, I convinced myself that it must be because of something that I had said or done. In the future, I vowed to myself, I would guard my words better."



"My mother taught me that reading is a kind of work, and that every paragraph merits exertion, and in this way, I learned how to absorb difficult books."



"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."



"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..."



"Working in the hospital teaches you that there are only two kinds of people in the world: the sick and the not sick. If you are not sick, shut up and help. Twenty-five years later, I still cannot reject this as an inaccurate worldview."



"Establishing yourself as a scientist takes an awfully long time. The riskiest part is learning what a true scientist is and then taking the first shaky steps down that path, which will become a road, which will become a highway, which will maybe someday lead you home. A true scientist doesn't perform prescribed experiments; she develops her own and thus generates wholly new knowledge. This transition between doing what you're told and telling yourself what to do generally occurs midway through a dissertation."



"America may say that it values science, but it sure as hell doesn't want to pay for it."



"A cactus doesn't live in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn't killed it yet."



"Love and learning are similar in that they can never be wasted."



"Public and private organizations all over the world have studied the mechanics of sexism within science and have concluded that they are complex and multifactorial. In my own small experience, sexism has been something very simple: the cumulative weight of constantly being told that you can't possibly be what you are."



"There's nothing like having a parent die to make you realize how alone you are in the world."



"I'm good at science because I'm not good at listening. I have been told that I am intelligent, and I have been told that I am simpleminded. I have been told that I am trying to do too much, and I have been told that what I have done amounts to very little. I have been told that I can't do what I want to do because I am a woman, and I have been told that I have only been allowed to do what I have done because I am a woman."