by Hope Jahren, 2016
I loved this book! I love its author, Hope Jahren! It’s a memoir about how she became a scientist with her very own lab, and her deep, deep friendship with a guy named Bill, who has been with her since the beginning of her journey. It’s laugh-out-loud funny, informative, uplifting and endearing. Loved this book from start to finish! She and Bill can spend hours upon hours doing meticulous research in the most painstaking detail. One time, they spend a whole day collecting teeny tiny moss samples in Ireland in test tubes, recording all the exact details, double-checking everything, only to have the whole thing trashed at the airport because they didn’t have a permit. But they love the process and they are such a team. You think they should be married, but they are not. They are the deepest of friends, two halves to a whole, but never live together, never marry. She is an original and her story is so, so good–thank you for sharing it, Hope!
Here are some of my favorite lines:
My great-grandparents, like practically everybody else’s in that town, had come to Minnesota as part of a mass emigration from Norway that began in about 1880…Entire years passed between our visits with my aunts and uncles, even though some of them lived in the same small town that we did. I didn’t much notice as my three older brothers grew up and left our home one by one, as it was not unusual for us to go days without finding anything to say to each other…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.
page 11, Roots and Leaves
My father turned the heavy iron handle, pushed with his shoulder, and opened our oaken front door. We went inside the house, into a different kind of cold…I could hear my mother in the kitchen unloading the dishwasher, the butter knives clanging together as she dropped them into the silverware drawer and then slammed it shut. She was always angry and I could never piece together why.
from page 12 of Roots and Leaves
Back at home, while my mother and I gardened and read together, I vaguely sensed that there was something we weren’t doing, something affectionate that normal mothers and daughters naturally do, but I couldn’t figure out what it was, and I suppose she couldn’t either. We probably do love each other, each in our own stubborn way, but I’m not entirely sure, probably because we have never openly talked about it.
from page 16 of Roots and Leaves
My lab is a place where my guilt over what I haven’t done is supplanted by all of the things that I am getting done. My uncalled parents, unpaid credit cards, unwashed dishes, and unshaved legs pale in comparison to the noble breakthrough under pursuit…I can work all night to analyze a rock that’s a hundred million years old, because I need to know what it’s made of before morning. All the baffling things that arrived unwelcome with adulthood–tax returns and car insurance and Pap smears–none of them matter when I am in the lap. There is no phone and so it doesn’t hurt when someone doesn’t call me. The door is locked and I know everyone who has a key.
writing about her lab on page 19 of Roots and Leaves
In 2009, I turned forty years old. By then I had been a professor for fourteen years. It was also the year that we made a significant breakthrough in isotope chemistry, by successfully building a machine that could work side by side with our mass spectrometer.
You probably have a bathroom scale that can tell the difference between a 180-pound man and a 185-pound man. I have a scientific scale that can tell the difference between an atom with twelve neutrons and an atom with thirteen neutrons. Actually, I have two such scales. They are called mass spectrometers, and they are worth about half a million dollars each. The university bought them for me with the not-so-tacit understanding that I would do wonderful and previously impossible things with them and thus further raise the scientific reputation of the institution.
Based on a rough cost-benefit analysis, I need to do about four wonderful and previously impossible things every single year until I fall into the grave in order for the university to break even on me. This is complicated by the fact that the money for every single other thing–chemicals, beakers, Post-it notes, a rag to polish the mass spectrometer–all has to be raised by me through written or verbal supplication for federal or private funding, which is diminishing rapidly on a national level. That is not the most stressful part. The salary of every single person in the lab–aside from my own–also has to be raised by this same mechanism…
from pages 21 and 22 of Roots and Leaves
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.
from page 44 of Roots and Leaves
I let myself into the lab and was surprised to find that the lights were on. I then saw Bill, who was sitting on an old lawn chair in the middle of the room and staring at a blank wall while listening to the static of talk radio on his little transistor.
“Hey, I found this chair in the Dumpster behind McDonald’s,” he told me as I walked in. “It seems to work.” He examined it with satisfaction while still sitting upon it.
I felt deeply happy to see him. I had anticipated at least three more lonely hours of waiting for someone to talk to.
“I like it,” I told him. “Can anybody sit in it?”
“Not today,” he said. “Maybe tomorrow.” He considered and then added, “But maybe not.”
I stood and thought about how every single thing that came out of this guy’s mouth was just a little on the weird side.
Against my Scandinavian instincts, I decided to tell Bill about the most important thing that I had ever done. “Hey, have you ever seen an x-ray of an opal?” I asked, holding up my paper readout.
Bill reached for his radio and silenced it by pulling out its nine-volt battery–the on-off switch had stopped working long ago. After he finished, he looked up at me. “I knew I was sitting here waiting for something,” he told me. “Turns out it was that.”
pages 72 and 73 of Roots and Leaves
…Planet Earth is nearly a Dr. Seuss book made real: every year since 1990 we have created more than eight billion new stumps. If we continue to fell healthy trees at this rate, less than six hundred years from now, every tree on the planet will have been reduced to a stump. My job is about making sure there will be some evidence that someone cared about the great tragedy that unfolded during our age.
…Every single year, at least one tree is cut down in your name. Here’s my personal request to you: If you own any private land at all, plant one tree on it this year. If you are renting a place with a yard, plant a tree in it and see if your landlord notices…
There are more than one thousand successful tree species for you to choose from, and that’s just for North America. You will be tempted to choose a fruit tree because they grow quickly and make beautiful flowers, but these species will break under moderate wind, even as adults…
from the epilogue of Lab Girl
The relationship between Hope and Bill is so close. They embark together on Hope’s journey to become a successful scientist. He helps her all along the way, and she helps him. They never live together, never sleep together, but they work together and it’s undeniable that they wouldn’t have made it without the other. You would think they would get married but no, Hope meets a handsome guy named Clint and falls madly in love, marries, has a child; a little boy, whom she thinks she will not be able to love adequately because she was never loved adequately by her own mother, but she ends up being a wonderfully loving mother. Bill is alongside for everything. They are best friends, lab partners, one-half of a whole. And Bill is hilarious – he reminds me of Jeff. And Hope reminds me of Julie and her lab work.
One of the things they did was they grew sweet potatoes in the carbon dioxide amounts predicted with global warming. They ended up twice as big but with much less protein and nutrition. I looked up the nutrition value of sweet potatoes and they only provide 2 grams of protein and it is an incomplete protein – must have some other type of protein to make them complete, like nuts or brown rice. (Just FYI)
I ABSOLUTELY LOVED THIS BOOK!!!!