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A tree's wood is also its memoir.
Hope Jahren
People love the ocean. People are always asking me why I don't study the ocean, because, after all, I live in Hawaii. I tell them that it's because the ocean is a lonely, empty place.
The world is a fickle place, and it's not fair. But if you're getting most of your rewards from you, then you can use that as a kind of compass, and you can be secure in the fact that you're working for the right reason, and you're going in the right direction.
Every acorn on the ground is just as alive as the three-hundred-year-old oak tree that towers over it.
You can pick wild strawberries with your eyes closed, locating them by smell, for they are two parts perfume to one part taste. An hour of searching might yield a handful if you're lucky. Wild strawberries can't be encouraged, nor can they be discouraged: They come to you unbidden and unearned. They appear, or do not, by the grace of the sun.
A seed knows how to wait... A seed is alive while it waits.
A cactus doesn't live in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn't killed it yet.
Science is so incremental and so full of setbacks and small steps forward. In order to really thrive in this business, you have to be able to glean as much joy from the failure days and from the small increments as you do from the breakthroughs.
If every seed turned into a plant, we'd be living in a very different world.
I love the quiet forest that stands between my lab and my home.
You can't drive through Iowa and not think about farming: No less than 85 percent of the land in the state is devoted to farms, many of them more than 1,000 acres. This is the place where seeds are sown. It's where farmers grow the corn that will be fed to pigs as grain or fed to you as syrup or fermented to ethanol for your gas tank.
While both plants and animals awaken via distinct changes in metabolic functioning, most plants prefer to err on the side of caution, waiting for hints of full-on summer before they bloom.
I love rocks with the unconditional love that you lavish upon a newborn baby.
I am a scientist who studies plants. I like plants. I think about plants almost every hour of the day, and several hours of the night as well.
I like weeds and hardy plants.
I am not the only scientist to be struck by the power and meaning of Lamium album in bloom.
I am not a farmer; I am a researcher who studies the plants that come to your dinner table, which means that I ask questions for a living.
Like all professors, I also do a lot of extra jobs for which I was never trained, such as advising former students as they navigate the wider world.
During the mid-1990s, I collected thousands of hackberry fruits from trees all across the Midwest. I chemically analyzed each seed in order to formulate an equation relating the hackberry's mineral makeup to the summer temperature under which it grew.
I feel like I'm the same scientist I was back when I couldn't get a grant. Now I'm that same person thinking that same way getting grants. That system of external rewards in science has always mystified me. It's fickle. And I also don't think it was constructed with people like me in mind.
Corn occupies a really special role in what I've been calling American agro-economics.
I'm interested in how the bare bones of the planet, things that aren't alive, are transformed into things that are alive.
I think it's very common that scientists or technical people have an artistic side. Sometimes they are very accomplished musicians. Sometimes they have very fine tastes according to art or design. And often, they've spent a big chunk of their childhood or they're growing-up years trying to get in very good at those activities.
Regardless of politics, our world will continue to change rapidly.
When I was 23, my Norwegian relatives taught me how to sit still. During the long sunlit evenings in the summer of 1992, my cousins would lead me across the farm to the edge of the forest, each of us lugging a folding chair. There, in a scraggly bramble of wild blueberries, we would set them down a few yards apart, each in our own little patch.
Plants are decisive to a fault. A stem produces a bud that flowers once and once only. It offers pollen that is either dispersed or goes nowhere. One pollen grain either enters a stigma or it falls upon stony ground. An ovum is either fertilized or the whole project stalls out.
There is a fundamental and culturally learned power imbalance between men and women, and it follows us into the workplace. The violence born of this imbalance follows us also. We would like to believe that it stops short of following us into the laboratory and into the field - but it does not.
I think there are fundamental power imbalances between the sexes that play themselves out in society. And I think science is just not immune to that - which actually isn't a very controversial stance if you think about it.
The type of science that I do is sometimes known as 'curiosity-driven research.' This means that my work will never result in a marketable product, a useful machine, a prescribable pill, a formidable weapon, or any direct gain.
For a tree, to endure four months of daylight is like you or I going without sleep for four months.
What is a berry? It is an ovary swaddled within a sugary womb. Plainly put, a berry is the fruition of a flower - the ultimate tautology.
A true scientist doesn't perform prescribed experiments; she develops her own and thus generates wholly new knowledge.
My earliest memories are being in the lab, and the way the cement felt and the way it smelled, and the way the countertops looked and it just being this wonderful, warm, happy place where it was just full of toys.
I grew up in a time when there were very few women in the physical sciences. And people started to ask me, 'How did you decide to become a scientist?' And I couldn't really answer. I always knew I'd grow up to have a lab because my dad had one.
There is nothing in the world more perfect than a slide rule. Its burnished aluminum feels cool against your lips, and if you hold it level to the light you can see God's most perfect right angle in each of its corners.
I think, as you move to the upper ranks of science - ranks being positions of influence and access - you see fewer female faces. And I think the basic reason is the same reason that you don't see a lot of female faces in Congress or on the Supreme Court or on the directing board of Fortune 500 companies.
I'm a scientist - a geobiologist who's been studying trees, flowers, seeds, and soil for over twenty years. One day, I realized that I wanted, needed, to tell people - and not just other scientists - about my life in science.
My father was a physicist, while I am a biogeochemist. I live to study plants, and he has never had more than a generic interest in biology.
Women live in a world where we are forced to consider our safety at every turn. We minimize risk while we maximize activity. It's this constant balancing act that we do.
Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable.
In New England, the pin oak thrives, its leaves tipping to a thorny point in a good-natured impression of its evergreen neighbor, the holly bush.
My laboratory is like a church because it is where I figure out what I believe.
Ask a science professor what she worries about. It won't take long. She'll look you in the eye and say one word: 'Money.'
I can explain to you in detail just how a tree can be made into paper. But I've always wondered - and hoped - that someday, someone would help me discover how paper can be made back into a tree.
My experiences have also convinced me that sexual harassment is very rarely publicly punished after it is reported, and then only after a pattern of relatively egregious offenses.
No matter how much funding I get, I'm always thinking, 'This is temporary. This is fragile. It could all end tomorrow, and how am I going to make today worth it? If this is my last day in the lab, what can I do so that I can walk out of here saying, 'That was a good day?''
The live oak can grow sturdily on the hottest hills of central California, contrasting dark green against the golden grass.
Women study things in order to figure out how they're connected to other things. I don't know if it's controversial to say that, but that's what I've seen from doing science for a couple of decades.
My father's schooling during the 1930s was heavy with memorization; eight decades later, he is reaping the benefits.
My father was a scientist, and I grew up in his laboratory. Maybe I am like him, but he is not like me.