Lab Girl

All plants are composed of leaf, stem, and root. Jahren emphasizes that stems are made of wood, and “thousands of years of human civilization have yet to produce a better multipurpose building material” (77). People still favor it as building material for houses, asevery piece of wood used in our houses was once part of a living being.

Trees lose limbs inevitably. However, when a limb is severed, new sheaths form over the broken base until there is nodiscernable scar where the branch used to be. Jahren examines the monkeypod tree on Manoa Road in Oahu with “its magnificent eight-thousand-square-foot canopy, woven through with flowers” (79). Even this tree has scars, however. If itwere to be cut down, all of its “buried scars” (79) would be revealed, pointing to all the branches it lost.

Jahren completes her Ph.D. in 1996 at the same time Bill receives his bachelor’s degree.After the graduation ceremony, Jahren and Bill go to the lab and spend the night “blowing glass” (80), that is, sealing up small amounts of carbon dioxide into glass tubes. Jahren “daydreams”(83) during the experiment and puts too much carbon dioxide in the tubes, which causes a large glass explosion in the lab. She and Bill take a walk to recover, with Bill smoking and Jahren chewing on her hands, a nervous tic she has. Jahren invites Bill to move to Atlanta with her, where she has accepted a position as a professor at Georgia Tech. He accepts and plans to move to Georgia in January after spending time at his family home in Southern California.

Jahren arrives in Atlanta in August of 1996, and she begins teaching geology to freshman and geochemistry to juniors. She is only 26 at the time and feels uncertain of her new role. She “embraced the persona of the amiable forgiving professor who was eager to give everyone an A” (86).

Jahren picks up Bill at the airport in January, and he notices that she looks tired and has lost weight. She explains:“I have anxiety. It’s my new thing” (87). The two go view the labspace that they will begin building together. Jahren notes:“It may have been a tiny hellhole, but it was ours” (89).

Jahren points out the fact that “a single tree can be in two places at once” (90). Although one tree may be older, it can be genetically identical to another tree. A tree may shed its branches, and if a branch successfully takes root, it can grow and produce “a genetically identical doppelgänger” (91). Jahren uses the willow to illustrate this point, noting that it sheds 10 percent of its branches in a single year. These branches take root and form new willows. They top the chart of tree growth rates. In a famous experiment, the willow “quietly outpaced the others” (91) in terms of growth and grew for six months through autumn and winter.

The horsetail is the oldest surviving family of plants on Earth, and it has beenaround for 395 million years. A sterile hybrid horsetail cannot reproduce, but spreads like willows. It grows from California to Georgia, spreading itself out.