Lab Girl

Jahren and Bill work on building a new lab at Johns Hopkins. They attend conferences, and Jahren notes: “I was getting my name out there and generally promoting a lab” (180). Jahren runs into her “academic uncle”(180)Ed, who is a retiring dean and a colleague of her dissertation advisor.Ed performed work on the “ups and downs of sea level over the eons” (180)and his work allowed a shell’s chemistry to be analyzed to determine how much ice was at the North Pole.

Ed is about to close his lab, so he offers his used equipment to Jahren. Bill and Jahren go to Cincinnati where they wrap and pack the equipment into a U-Haul. They marvel at Ed’s mass spectrometer, an instrument used to calculate scientific mass. Jahren and Bill drive the equipment back to the lap at Hopkins.

Jahren explains that some trees like spruce, pine, and birch are built to endure winter and snow. It is a “journey,” and they must “pack carefully” (190). Trees are made up of water, and they must prevent this water from freezing in order to survive. They undergo a “hardening” in which their cells walls change to make it harder for the fluid within them to freeze. These trees do not grow during winter but rather wait for the Earth to rotate towards the Sun. The hardening process is triggered by changing light.

Jahren, Bill, and 10 other scientists spend the summer in Axel Heiberg Island in Canada. They are the only people within a 300-mile radius. The other 10 scientists are paleontologists from U Penn who spend their days digging for and excavating fossils. Jahren and Bill, who are interested in the duration and stability of the forest, work while the paleontologists sleep and vice versa. Jahren and Bill tunnel vertically through layers, and each week “[they]’d thrash around in a different twelve-foot pile of forty-million-year-old dry compost” (198).

One day they spot a hare and follow it to a geographical high point. They rest and talk, and Bill reveals he was teased as a child for missing part of his hand. As a result, he didn’t participate in activities like Cub Scouts or go to prom. Jahren urges him to dance, and “there at the end of the world, he danced in the broad and endless daylight” (201).

Jahren explains that all sex is designed to “mix the genes of two separate individuals and then produce a new individual sporting genes identical to neither parent” (202). Touch is necessary, but making this contact is problematic for plants. Self-fertilization can occur, where male and female parts of the same plant touch, but real fertilization must happen periodically.Almost all of the pollen in the world does not fertilize anything.

Insects can aid in pollinationby carrying pollen from one flower to another, like a wasp to a fig plant. Trees like magnolia, maple, dogwood, willow, cherry, and apple spread their pollen on flies and beetles, while elm, birch, oak, poplar, walnut, pine, and spruce release their pollen into the wind. It’s rare to successfully pollinate a plant, “but when it does happen it triggers a supernova of possibilities” (204).