Lab Girl

SUCH a good book.

All the excerpts below are the artist's words:

My lab is both private and familiar...My lab is the place where I put my brain out on my fingers and I do things.

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 lab is a place where I can be the child that I still am  It is the place where I play with my best friend.  I can laugh in my lab and be ridiculous.

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 lab...Because the outside world cannot come into the lab, the lab has become the place where I can be the real me.

My laboratory is like a church because it is where I figure out what I believe...My lab is a place to go on sacred days... On holidays, when the rest of the world is closed, my lab is open.  My lab is a refuge and an asylum.  It is a retreat from the professional battlefield; it is the place where I coolly examine my wounds and repair my armor.

Referring to her lab partner:
He is strong where I am weak, and so together we make one complete person, each of us gaining half of what we need from the world and the other half from each other...Within two separate but adjacent rooms, we tuned two radios to different stations and went back to our work, having once again reassured each other that we are not alone.

Regarding a lotus seed:
...they discovered that their seedling had been waiting for them within a peat bog in China for no less than two thousand years.  This tiny seed had stubbornly kept up the hope of its own future while entire human civilizations rose and fell.


A willow tree is far more like Cinderella than it is like Rapunzel in that her lot in life involves working harder than her sisters.  There's a famous study in which scientists compared the growth rates of a group of trees for a year.

Humans are actively creating a world where only weeds can live and then feigning shock and outrage upon finding so many.  The mixed message is irrelevant:  there is already a revolution taking place in the plant world as invasives effortlessly supplant natives within every human-modified space.  We aren't getting the revolution we want, we're getting the one that we triggered.

Whenever you stroll through a eucalyptus grove, you are engulfed in a unique smell, acrid and spicy and a little soapy too.  What you are actually sensing is an airborne chemical that is created and released from the trees...as part of an antiseptic that will keep its leaves and bark healthy if it is wounded, preventing infection.

In order to prepare for their long winter journey, trees undergo a process known as "hardening".  First the permeability of the cell walls increased drastically, allowing pure water to flow out wile concentrating the sugars, proteins,, and acids left behind.  These chemicals act as a potent antifreeze, such that the cell can now dip will below freezing and the fluid inside of it will still persist in a syrupy liquid.  The spaces between the cells are now filled with an ultra pure distillate of cell water, so pure that there are no stray atoms upon which an ice crystal could nucleate and grow.

I'm good at science because I'm not good at listening.  I have been told that I am intelligent, and I have been told that I am simple minded.  I have been told that I am trying to do too much, and I have been told that I what I have done amounts to very little.  I have been told that i have only been allowed to do what I have done because I am a woman, I have been told that I can have eternal life, I have been admonished for being too feminine and I have been distrusted for being too masculine.  I have been warned that I am far too sensitive and I have been accused of being heartlessly callous.  But I was told all of these things by people who can't understand the present or see the future any better than I can.

Excerpts from the Epilogue:

In languages across the globe, the adjective "green" is etymologically rooted in the verb "to grow".  In free-association studies, participants linked the word "green" to concepts of nature, restfulness, peace and positivity.  Research has shown how a brief glimpse of green significantly improved the creativity that people brought to bear on simple tasks.

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.  If she does, insist to her that it was always there.  Throw in a bit about how exceptional she is for caring enough about the environment to have put it there.  If she takes the bait, go plant another one.  Baffle some chicken wire around its base and string a cheesy birdhouse around its tiny trunk to make it look permanent, then move out and hope for the best.

Once your baby tree is in the ground, check it daily, because the first three years are critical.  Remember that you are your tree's only friend in a hostile world.  If you do own the land that it is planted on, create a savings account and put five dollars in it every month, so that when your tree gets sick between the ages of twenty and thirty (and it will), you can have a tree doctor over to cure it, instead of just cutting it down..  Each time you blow your account, put your head down and start over.

At the end of this exercise, you'll have a tree and it will have you.  You can measure it monthly and chart your own growth curve.  Every day, you can look at your tree, watch what it does, and try to see the world from its perspective.  Stretch your imagination until it hurts.  What is your tree trying to do?  What does it wish for?  What does it care about?