Lab Girl

I don't really know what to make of this one. I really liked Jahren's discussion of botany and chemistry when it was happening. Jahren is hard on people: her students, her co-workers, but also herself and she pulled no punches in describing herself, which led to challenging passages where I was cringing at her condescension towards colleagues and students. I liked how she depicted herself learning and growing, and making her way through bipolar disease. It was truly vulnerable and authentic. Nonetheless, I don't think I'd send one of my students to rotate through her lab -- it's clear that she embraces the sort of work-to-death environment that academia is struggling to grow out of.

Speaking of generation gaps, I was surprised to find that Jahren has barely more than a decade on me. From the way she described being a woman in science, I would have guessed more like three decades. Indeed, many of her faculty members were women, and my own experience in overlapping years in the life sciences was that there was very little overt sexism.

I loved reading about her relationship with Bill, her lab manager, but I note his conspicuous absence from the press releases, her lab website and many of her publications. It's hard to read about how she sees him as a partner while he's underpaid and underacknowledged for the work he does. Finding grants to pay people is brutal -- I know that personally -- but now she's a big deal and he could have fancy titles and a nice profile on the lab website but he's not even mentioned. Perhaps that's how he wants it, but it's weird to write a book about your friendship with an employee and then not use any of your employer privileges to support said employee.

As far as memoirs go, I enjoyed the nonlinear style, mixed with natural history, philosophical musings and inner thoughts.

Between the high expectations to overcome as a woman in science, the patriarchal gender norms, the stress of gathering funds alongside her male lab partner with whom she has a special relationship (which had several pressure points, for that relationship to be defined, or to "progress" in a direction she didn't want, even though the expectations were there as well).

Really loved reading about her relationship with her mom. How she had to overcome the imposed upon her housewife status. How she inspired her love for not just reading but exhaustively reading a book.

Also loved her relationship with her husband, how in spite of people telling her, at various points, that she was too inexpressive or too expressive, their relationship had the right chemistry.

Two quotes I really loved:

"People don't know to make a leaf, but they know how to destroy one."

„Our world is falling apart quietly. 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 a 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.”

The one thing I disliked — the fact that she cared so deeply about plants, about the planet, but in several instances described eating beings. Wish she applied her way of thinking to what's on her plate as well. Or, rather, who is on her plate.

Ma swoje mocne momenty, ma swoje słabe i wręcz infantylne momenty.
To, że historia jest napisana przez kobietę daje inną perspektywę na organizację nauki, środowisko naukowe. Poza tym jednak pamiętnik ten z czasem staje się coraz bardziej tkliwy (chyba tak po prostu "po kobiecemu") i opisuje relacje prywatne, czy w pewnym momencie wręcz szczegółowy opis porodu. Nie brak jednak ciekawych opisów amerykańskiego systemu nauki czy botanicznych badań autorki, jak również niektórych sytuacji z życia badaczki.
Co drugi rozdział poświęcony jest na opis drzewa (od ogółu do szczegółu) - nie można nie porównać tego do dużo lepszych "Patyków, badyli" U. Zajączkowskiej.
Książka dość nierówna i pamiętnik na przestrzeni stron przyjmuje różnoraką formę. Były strony, gdzie "akcja" bardzo wciągała, a były i takie, które omiatało się przelotnie.
Niemniej jednak samą autorkę całkiem polubiłem, i choć nie jest to nigdzie wprost opisane, to czuje się ten wzrost doświadczenia i wpływu, wzrostu w hierarchii badaczki w gronie akademickim.

I loved this book so much. Back in my academic career, especially the last year, I was actually pretty close to Hope Jahren's field, plants, from the geophysics side. I even worked with a professor who just like her got the Macelwane medal (and was one of the reasons I left academia).
The book is a love story, but a love story with science against any reason. She and her eternal friend Bill figured out how to do the science they loved against sexism, the general hatred of science, shortage of money, situations they were not qualified to handle.
As beautiful as both the life story and the science parts of this book are, it makes me sad. I don't like how she glorifies working any waking moment of your life to be able to be in the field, because I strongly despise the way science works. I feel noone should work under these conditions, but it just shows how strong the people are that stay in it, how compassionate they are about learning and finding new facts and truths. There is a way strong romanticism in this way that despite everything made me a bit nostalgic.
The book does an amazing job of sharing this world. I'm despondent how much the world, and especially the US hate science, hate knowing things. We're living in a truly sad world.

Carl Sagan said, "If you wish to make apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." Hope Jahren had to do exactly that because there didn't seem to be a place for her in the one she was born into. Along the way she meets Bill who needed a place as well and she creates one for both of them. That's what science is really about--not taking things for granted--but it's difficult feeling like a misfit because you're seen as one by those who do.

This is a book about the painful sort-of-success of the unorthodox point of view, including the unorthodox points of view of plants. It's a sort-of-success because even the plants are still struggling to survive (no thanks to humans), as is science for curiosity rather than commerce or defense.

I'd like to tell Ms. Jahren that when I was in grad school, my thesis adviser managed to convince the department of defense that they should fund projects that were less likely to be of use to them than exploring the inner life of trees. It's a different form of creative writing.

This is the first book I've pre-ordered for a long time, based on reading Hope Jahren's blog (#HopeJahrenSureCanWrite - an accurate name) and interviews on various media.
I was not disappointed.
The first thing that struck me is that this reads more like a novel than a straight memoir in that her use of language is similar to that you would find in literature and the events related seem to be picked more with a novelist's eye to revealing the characters and their motivation than to, say a journalist's eye for narrative.
My previous benchmark for a book about life in biology labs is [b:Natural Obsessions: Striving to Unlock the Deepest Secrets of the Cancer Cell|23825157|Natural Obsessions Striving to Unlock the Deepest Secrets of the Cancer Cell|Natalie Angier|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1438557140s/23825157.jpg|43437374], but Natalie is a journalist and writes that way. I prefer Lab Girl and will recommend it even to people not interested in science because it will be a "good read", whereas you have to have a good deal of interest in a life in science to read Angier, but they're a good pair if you are so interested.
Lab Girl is also interesting to me because Hope Jahren is such an unusual (and talented) person. She would have had to be to shoulder her way into a white male-dominated profession. This is also the story of Hope and Bill, Bill being an equally unusual man with complementary talents, as they work together over a very long time as they find ways to find out what plants are up to.
The biographical chapters are interspersed with some fascinating facts about plants. I'm a plant person myself, though mostly from the gardening point-of-view but I have done undergraduate-level study of plants so there wasn't a lot new to me except the "putting in perspective" parts where she tells us, for example, how much paper you would get from a medium-sized tree's leaves, or how much magnesium you need to make their chlorophyll. But Hope's prose poetry on even the things I know were a pleasure to read.
I've never really wanted to be a lab scientist. This book convinced me I wouldn't want to be - my personality doesn't fit that well. However, there were so many other touch points with my own unusual life, things we've done both important and trivial (e.g. we both read Jean Genet at about the same age, both moved countries and cities several times in pursuit of life goals) and ways we look at things that provoked a shock of recognition, that it helped me think about my own life in new ways, and what I might try next as I look for yet another change in career.
You will do yourself a big favour if you read this.