Lab Girl Page 30

  While you’re at it, would you carve Bill’s name into your tree as well? He’s told me a hundred times over that he’ll never read this book because it would be pointless. He says that if he ever gets at all interested in himself he can damn well sit down and remember the last twenty years without any help from me. I don’t have a good comeback for that one, but I’d like to think that the many parts of Bill that I’ve released to the wind belong somewhere, and over the years we’ve learned that the best way to give something a home is to make it part of a tree. My name is carved into a bunch of our lab equipment, so why shouldn’t Bill’s name be carved into a bunch of trees?

  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? Make a guess. Say it out loud. Tell your friend about your tree; tell your neighbor. Wonder if you are right. Go back the next day and reconsider. Take a photograph. Count the leaves. Guess again. Say it out loud. Write it down. Tell the guy at the coffee shop; tell your boss.

  Go back the next day, and the next, and so on. Keep talking about it; keep sharing its unfolding story. Once people begin to roll their eyes and gently tell you that you’re crazy, laugh with gratification. When you’re a scientist, it means that you’re doing it right.

  Acknowledgments

  Writing Lab Girl has been the most joyful work of my life, and I am grateful to those who helped and supported me. I thank everyone at Knopf, especially my editor, Robin Desser. This is a better book and I am a better writer because of the care she has taken. Tina Bennett has been more than my agent: she taught me the difference between a bunch of stories and a book. My great debt to her is my most precious professional possession. Svetlana Katz was my lifeline for years while I was searching for the style of this narrative. She never doubted and so I kept the faith. No words can describe the gratitude that a hopeful writer feels for the first known author who reads her work and then encourages her. For me, that person was Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. I can name no deeper comfort than the friendship of those who knew me as a child. Thank you, Connie Luhmann, for being my eyes when I needed you. I am also grateful to Heather Schmidt, Dan Shore, and Andy Elby, who after reading some, always came back and asked to read more.

  Endnote

  Every book about plants is a story without an ending. For each of the facts that I’ve shared with you, there are at least two baffling mysteries that I’m aching to solve. Can grown trees recognize their own seedlings? Is there plant life on other planets? Did the very first flowers make the dinosaurs sneeze? All of those questions will have to wait for another day. But here I can’t resist adding a few more details about how I figured out some of the content and presented it.

  A good deal of the information about plants in Lab Girl was derived from calculations that I acquired the habit of making during my twenty-plus years of teaching, in order to help facts “stick” in the minds of my students. For example, this sentence in chapter 9 of Part Two: “In the United States alone, the total length of the wooden planks used during the last twenty years was more than enough to build a footbridge from the planet Earth to the planet Mars” (this page) was drawn from a simple comparison of lumber consumption statistics as reported by the U.S. Department of Commerce (805 billion board feet used between 1995 and 2010), with the average distance from Earth to the planet Mars as reported by NASA (140 million miles, which equals 739 billion feet). Other places where I have accessed similar facts or statistics for this book include the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Center for Health Statistics, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

  Making certain of the calculations in Lab Girl was of course complicated by the fact that every conceivable attribute one can measure for a particular plant reveals a vast variation, when compared to other plants of different species. To illustrate: in order to make the calculation presented in chapter 3 of Part One about the relative abundance of growing plants versus waiting seeds, I pictured myself in a deciduous forest, and so estimated 500 seeds lying dormant in the soil beneath each of my footsteps. Had I instead chosen to picture myself walking through a grassland, I would have estimated more than 5,000 seeds beneath each footstep, due to the fact that grass seeds are much, much smaller than those dispersed by trees—a big difference. So while writing Lab Girl, I held myself to the following policy: whenever presented with such a choice, I picked the scenario where the scope of variation yielded a more modest result. Therefore, I would ask a reader to bear in mind that each of my claims about plants, impressive and marvelous as some of them may appear, were set up to “err” on the side of understatement.

  My calculations regarding a “modest, unremarkable tree” described in chapter 5 of Part Two were based upon a real tree, familiar and dear to my heart: a small candlenut (Aleurites moluccanus), very similar in appearance and function to the more common maple. The little candlenut is one of the trees growing in the courtyard outside my laboratory at the University of Hawaii. For many years I taught a class called Terrestrial Geobiology, and at the end of each lecture, the students and I would go outside to visit the tree and reflect upon it as an illustration of the day’s material. As one of the homework exercises for the course, the students and I measured the various properties (total height, leaf density, carbon content, etc.) that allowed us to calculate how much water, sugar, and nutrients the tree requires every growing season—that is, the information that I’ve presented on this page.

  In my description of federal funding in the United States for “curiosity-driven research” found within chapter 5 of Part Two (pages 121–25), I used data from Fiscal Year 2013, because it seemed to best reflect the most recent and complete datasets across multiple government agencies. However, it matters little which year I used for my analysis, as the total federal allocation to the National Science Foundation has not meaningfully increased for more than a decade. Similarly, my statement on this page that “the amount of the U.S. annual budget that goes to non-defense-related research has been frozen” is based on data compiled by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which revealed that for every year since 1983, total spending on scientific research has comprised a flat 3 percent of the total United States federal budget.

  In studying plants, I am fortunate to work within a field populated by exceptionally creative and prolific researchers, and I relish the time that I spend reading about studies performed by my peers. I worked the story of my “top three” such studies into the pages of Lab Girl, and I want to credit the scientists behind the original experiments:

  The Sitka willow experiments described on this page were first published by D. F. Rhoades in 1983. It was not until 2004, more than twenty years later, that G. Arimura and coauthors showed how VOC production in one plant could affect gene expression within a separate plant upon exposure, and thus demonstrated the mechanism by which the willow trees communicated with one another.

  The phenomenon that scientists call “hydraulic lift”—or water moving “up from the strong and out toward the weak” as I describe it on this page—was first shown by Dawson (1993) within sugar maple (Acer sacchum).

  It was Kvaalen and Johnsen (2008) who demonstrated that Picea abies “remembered their cold seedhoods”—as I put it on this page—by comparing juvenile trees that had been cultured as embryos under different temperatures and then grown for years within the same greenhouse.

  And finally, for readers who find themselves wanting to know more about the living green that surrounds us, I recommend that they waste no time in getting ahold of P. A. Thomas’s book Trees: Their Natural History (2000), a clearly written introductory textbook full of fascinating information. Whenever people tell me that they are interested i
n learning more about deforestation, or about global change in general, I point them toward the illuminating Vital Signs series, which is the annual publication of the Worldwatch Institute (www.worldwatch.org), a nongovernmental organization and independent research institute founded in 1974 that analyzes the ongoing changes, trends, and global patterns found in the data collected each year by multiple agencies within the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the International Energy Agency, the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme, as well as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and many other agencies.

  WORKS CITED

  Arimura, G., D. P. Huber, and J. Bohlmann. 2004. Forest tent caterpillars (Malacosoma disstria) induce local and systemic diurnal emissions of terpenoid volatiles in hybrid poplar (Populus trichocarpa × deltoides): cDNA cloning, functional characterization, and patterns of gene expression of (−)-germacrene D synthase, PtdTPS1. Plant Journal 37 (4):603–16.

  Dawson, T. E. 1993. Hydraulic lift and water use by plants: Implications for water balance, performance and plant-plant interactions. Oecologia 95 (4):565–74.

  Kvaalen, H., and Ø. Johnsen. 2008. Timing of bud set in Picea abies is regulated by a memory of temperature during zygotic and somatic embryogenesis. New Phytologist 177 (1):49–59.

  Rhoades, D. F. 1983. Responses of alder and willow to attack by tent caterpillars and webworms: Evidence for pheromonal sensitivity of willows. In Plant resistance to insects, ed. P. A. Hedin, 55–68. Washington, D.C.: American Chemical Society.

  Thomas, P. A. 2000. Trees: Their natural history. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Hope Jahren has been pursuing independent research in geobiology since 1996, when she completed her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, and began teaching and researching, first at the Georgia Institute of Technology and then at Johns Hopkins University. She is the recipient of three Fulbright Awards and is one of four scientists, and the only woman, to have been awarded both of the Young Investigator Medals given in the earth sciences. She is currently a tenured professor at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa in Honolulu, where in 2008 she built the Stable Isotope Geobiology Laboratories, with support from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the National Institutes of Health.

  Find her online at hopejahrensurecanwrite.com and www.jahrenlab.com.

  What’s next on

  your reading list?

  Discover your next

  great read!

  * * *

  Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.

  Sign up now.