America may say that it values science, but it sure as hell doesn't want to pay for it.

I grew up in a small town.

I am a scientist. To be specific, I am a woman scientist. This, I have been told and have come to believe, is a good thing. In fact, it is such a good thing that America needs more of us. Everyone seems to be very sure of this. The thing that no one is sure about, however, is how to make it happen.

I spend a lot of time talking to other scientists and writing to other scientists.

In our tiny town, my father wasn't a scientist - he was the scientist, and being a scientist wasn't his job: it was his identity.

When I was five, I came to understand that I was not a boy.

I love to read stories. And I don't to get to talk about my favorite novels very often in my job.

Science is performed by people, and it's subject to all the various foibles that plague the rest of our social dynamics.

I think the best learning is done with active manipulation. And we need to be able to work with our hands; it's not just about using our brains.

I think plants present an opportunity for people to look closely at something and get invested in something that's truly very much outside of themselves.

It's very important to put children in an environment where they can take things apart; where they can break things and then learn to fix them; where they can trust their hands and know their capacity to manipulate objects.

My life is pretty small. Even as a successful scientist, I'm not a public figure. I like people - I just don't know that many!

I have learned that nothing gets readers so fired up as saying something everyone knows is true.

As an environmental scientist, I think our first need is to feed and shelter and nurture. That has always required the exploitation of plant life, and it always will.

Plants are not like us, and the more you study plants, the more different and deep ways you see that they are not like us.

I grew up in my father's laboratory and played beneath the chemical benches until I was tall enough to play on them.

Even a very little girl can wield a slide rule, the cursor serving as a haft.

We must continue as in millennia past, nourishing the future as we feed ourselves and, each year, plant only the very best of what we have collectively engineered.

We must feed, shelter, and nurture one another as our first priority, and to do so, we must avail ourselves of our best technologies, which have always included some type of genetic modification.

One cannot rule out a blizzard in Minnesota after Labor Day, and so when I travel for Thanksgiving or any time in the fall, I am careful to fly into Des Moines instead of Minneapolis and then drive the 200 miles north to my hometown.

I was a promising graduate student. I landed a position as a professor before I even started to write my dissertation. While I prepared to start my new job, I decided that I would begin by studying the brine that bleeds sideways within the rocks that underlie the inner Aegean region of Turkey.

The evasion of justice within academia is all the more infuriating because the course of sexual harassment is so predictable. Since I started writing about women and science, my female colleagues have been moved to share their stories with me; my inbox is an inadvertent clearinghouse for unsolicited love notes.

The absence of women within STEM programs is not only progressive, it is persistent - despite more than 20 years of programs intended to encourage the participation of girls and women.

In my Scandinavian-American family, we were conditioned never to sit, at least not comfortably. I was endlessly going back to work. We longed for the fleeting respite of being useful and regarded sleep as a reward for exhaustion, always to be deferred until after the sun goes down.