At the risk of sounding blunt, the new memoir, “Lab Girl,” by geobiologist Hope Jahren is about many things — but science is the least of them. “Lab Girl” has been universally celebrated as a glimpse behind the rarefied scientific curtain, from a woman’s perspective no less. And while the writing is superb with a hearty blend of botanical facts sprinkled in, Jahren’s main themes turn out to be the difficulties scientists face in securing funding and her close working relationship with her lab partner Bill.
Readers looking for a road map to lead their daughters toward STEM careers will be disappointed.
Jahren offers a few tantalizing glimpses into her childhood, which help to justify her interest in science. The daughter of a geology professor and a mother whose own ambitions were thwarted in favor of family, Jahren had a clear mandate for entering her chosen field of geobioloy. “Growing up is a long and painful process for everyone,” she says, “and the only thing I ever knew for certain was that someday I would have my own laboratory because my father had one.”
But frustratingly, any mention of her parents and their possible support or opposition to her choices ends there. She mentions only in passing that they were not present at any milestone in her life, but gives no explanation why. This is a running flaw in her storytelling; she dangles tidbits of information, never to take them up again. Such as when she introduces the fact that she has been diagnosed with manic-depression, turning it into a run-on stream of consciousness chapter. Then she drops the issue, and its possible effects on her work, completely. The conspicuous lack of information is a distraction from her story.
Childhood firmly behind her, Jahren jumps right into her experiences building her laboratories at various universities. She intersperses each chapter of her life with a botanical anecdote that dovetails with her own trials. These smaller chapters were the highlight of the book for me because Jahren uses beautiful prose to breathe a nobility into the life of plants, imbuing them with personality and purpose. In describing how leaves developed the ability to produce sugar for trees she says: “One new idea allowed the plant to see a new world and draw sweetness out of a whole new sky.” Alas, the botanical sections of the book are merely bookends to the story of Hope and her lab partner Bill. Any scientific terminology is used to anchor the characters to their location in the lab and not to illustrate what it means to become a scientist.
The biggest takeaway from “Lab Girl” is Jahren’s career-long working relationship with Bill. The reader is taken on endless road trips, late-night cram sessions and backwoods explorations more suited to a buddy comedy film than a professional scientist’s memoir. Hope and Bill have a deep and meaningful friendship, even after her marriage, but their undisguised disdain for their graduate students does little to endear them to the reader. Many instances of scorn and ridicule towards her students are presented as humorous, but come across as cruel. And while it’s obvious that she and Bill find solace in each other’s company, their hard-bitten attitude to the rest of the world makes their friendship less sympathetic. “Lab Girl” centers around their friendship. Science, students and career are tangential to their story.
In her publicity interviews for the book, Jahren repeats again and again the mantra: funding, funding, funding. Unsurprisingly, it forms the backbone of her memoir. She and Bill are always portrayed either hoping for, spending or damning their lack of university funding. She’s at her best when deploring the short sightedness of the system that places little value on curiosity-based science. She makes a powerful argument for the support of science for science’s sake. From it will come the solution to some of the world’s greatest environmental threats.
Hand-in-glove with her criticism of the universities’ funding strategies is her claim that there are too many scientists entering the field today. She argues that each new scientist graduating further dilutes available funds, subverting the work of experts. “From a purely budgetary perspective, we don’t have too few scientists, we’ve got far too many, and we keep graduating more each year. America may say it values science, but it sure as hell doesn’t want to pay for it. Within environmental science in particular, we see the crippling effects that come from having been resource-hobbled for decades: degrading farmland, species extinction, progressive deforestation,” she says.
Of course, this flies directly in the face of so much of what we hear from experts. But her point is well made: if the grant system is not changed, there is little point in over-supplying an already saturated field.
As much as I wanted “Lab Girl” to be a window into what it’s like to become a scientist, it was not that. Instead, it was a touching story of friendship and an open critique of the way we fund science in the United States. Jahren leaves out any of her struggle to obtain her prestigious position in favor of a platonic love story, which is disappointing. What she does include, about biology and about the future of scientific research, are fascinating.
For someone hoping for motivation or insight into the making of a scientist, this may not suit your needs. As an industry appraisal however, it speaks loud and clear about the need to reassess the value of science in America.
