Lab Girl is more
exhilarating, inspiring, entertaining, and brave than any memoir by a botany
researcher has any right to be. It educates about plants, points out the
inherent problems with funding for curiosity-based science, and gives a glimpse
inside the mind of a brilliant but troubled scientist.
We follow Jahren, a native of the never-named but
thinly-disguised Austin, Minnesota, from childhood to doctorhood to parenthood,
with stops in between in Minneapolis, Berkeley, Atlanta, Baltimore, and Hawaii.
It’s interspersed with frequently-fascinating asides about plant science, where
you will learn many things you didn’t know you didn’t know about why plants do
the things they do. For example, why the leaves on a tree are larger and darker
on the top of the tree than on the bottom, and the thousands of years-old lotus
seed that was found in a Chinese peat bog.
Jahren grows up in a family that, as many of us who grew up
in the small-town Midwest can relate, does a much better job of showing their love
than talking about it. Her father taught science at the local community
college, and Jahren got free run of the place in the off hours. That interest
in science brought her to the University of Minnesota on a scholarship, where
she considered medical school but couldn’t afford it.
She worked a series of part-time jobs to put herself through
school, including a jaunt as an IV-bag mixer at the U of M hospital. It’s
during this time that Jahren’s manic tendencies are first hinted at, as she
goes several days at a time without sleeping while studying and pulling double
shifts at the hospital.
UC-Berkeley is her next stop, as Jahren puts herself through
grad school on a research assistantship which includes a lot of incredibly
boring-sounding soils research. It’s through that work that she meets Bill, a
kindred spirit who platonically accompanies her through the entire rest of the
book, building labs, crashing in (and once, just straight-up crashing) vans,
and eating as horribly as their meager earnings allow.
Jahren and Bill sojourn onward to Georgia Tech and Johns
Hopkins, building labs, running mass spectrometers, and carbon-dating the shit
out of things. They push themselves too hard for too long with too little
money, and eventually the cracks begin to show. After some significant
individual breakdowns, things get better and they move to Hawaii, with Jahren
tenured and Bill on solid financial footing thanks to a savvy real-estate move.
Jahren gets married to an intellectual equal and has a child, and things end as
happily-ever-after as anything can for people who are well aware that they live
on a dying planet giving too much for what will never be a reasonable return.
As someone who works a job much more for a check than for
anything that can be considered passion, I greatly admire the sincere enjoyment
and full-on commitment that Jahren brings to her work. I’m also curious how
much of that brain chemistry that drives her to unparalleled excellence in her
field is the flip side of the manic-depressive coin. And also, is that mental
instability part of the price that she has to pay for the work necessary to
rise to the level of her more-privileged male counterparts, whose ability was
never questioned because of their sex? These are all compelling questions, and
while Lab Girl doesn’t offer easy
answers, it provides plenty of food for thought.
No comments:
Post a Comment