Lab Girl (32 page)

At the end of a long silence Bill surprised me by saying with quiet seriousness, “Put it in a book. Do me that favor someday.”

Bill knows about my writing. He knows about the pages of poetry stuffed into my car's glove box; he knows about the many nextstory.doc files on my hard drive; he knows how I like to sift through the thesaurus for hours; he knows that nothing feels better to me than finding exactly the right word that stabs cleanly at the heart of what you are trying to say. He knows that I read most books twice or more and write long letters to their authors, and that sometimes I even get an answer. He knows how much I need to write. But he had never given me permission to write about us until that day. I nodded and inwardly vowed to do my best.

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 what I have done amounts to very little. I have been told that I can't do what I want to do because I am a woman, and 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, and I have been told that I will burn myself out into an early death. 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. Such recurrent pronouncements have forced me to accept that because I am a female scientist, nobody knows
what
the hell I am, and it has given me the delicious freedom to make it up as I go along. I don't take advice from my colleagues, and I try not to give it. When I am pressed, I resort to these two sentences: You shouldn't take this job too seriously. Except for when you should.

I have accepted that I don't know all the things that I ought to know, but I do know the things that I need to know. I don't know how to say “I love you,” but I do know how to show it. The people who love me know the same.

Science is work, nothing more and nothing less. And so we will keep working as another day dawns and this week turns into next week, and then this month becomes next month. I can feel the warmth of the same brilliant sun that shines above the forest and onto the green world, but in my heart I know that I am not a plant. I am more like an ant, driven to find and carry single dead needles, one after the other, all the way across the forest and then add them one by one to a pile so massive that I can only fully imagine one small corner of it.

As a scientist I am indeed only an ant, insufficient and anonymous, but I am stronger than I look and part of something that is much bigger than I am. Together we are building something that will fill our grandchildren's grandchildren with awe, and while building we consult daily the crude instructions provided by our grandfathers' grandfathers. As a tiny, living part of the scientific collective, I've sat alone countless nights in the dark, burning my metal candle and watching a foreign world with an aching heart. Like anyone else who harbors precious secrets wrought from years of searching, I have longed for someone to tell.

PLANTS ARE NOT LIKE US.
They are different in critical and fundamental ways. As I catalog the differences between plants and animals, the horizon stretches out before me faster than I can travel and forces me to acknowledge that perhaps I was destined to study plants for decades only in order to more fully appreciate that they are beings we can never truly understand. Only when we begin to grasp this deep otherness can we be sure we are no longer projecting ourselves onto plants. Finally we can begin to recognize what is actually happening.

Our world is falling apart quietly. Human civilization has reduced the plant, a four-hundred-million-year-old life form, into three things: food, medicine, and wood. In our relentless and ever-intensifying obsession with obtaining a higher volume, potency, and variety of these three things, we have devastated plant ecology to an extent that millions of years of natural disaster could not. Roads have grown like a manic fungus, and the endless miles of ditches that bracket these roads serve as hasty graves for perhaps millions of plant species extinguished in the name of progress. Planet Earth is nearly a Dr. Seuss book made real: every year since 1990 we have created more than eight billion new stumps. If we continue to fell healthy trees at this rate, less than six hundred years from now, every tree on the planet will have been reduced to a stump. My job is about making sure there will be some evidence that someone cared about the great tragedy that unfolded during our age.

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. Viewed from space, our planet appears less green with each passing year. On my bad days, our global troubles seem only to have increased over my lifetime, and I can't escape my greatest nagging fear: When we are gone, will we leave our heirs stranded in a pile of rubble, just as sick and hungry and war-exhausted as we ever were, bereft even of the homely comfort of the color green? But on my good days, I feel like I can do something about this.

Every single year, at least one tree is cut down in your name. 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 he does, insist to him that it was always there. Throw in a bit about how exceptional he is for caring enough about the environment to have put it there. If he takes the bait, go plant another one. Baffle some chicken wire at its base and string a cheesy birdhouse around its tiny trunk to make it look permanent, then move out and hope for the best.

There are more than one thousand successful tree species for you to choose from, and that's just for North America. You will be tempted to choose a fruit tree because they grow quickly and make beautiful flowers, but these species will break under moderate wind, even as adults. Shyster tree planting services will pressure you to buy a Bradford pear or two because they establish and flourish in one year; you'll be happy with the result long enough for them to cash your check. Unfortunately, these trees are also notoriously weak in the crotch and will crack in half during the first big storm. You must choose with a clear head and open eyes. You are marrying this tree: choose a partner, not an ornament.

How about an oak? There are more than two hundred species and one is bound to be adapted to your specific corner of the planet. 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. The turkey oak can grow practically submerged within the wetlands of Mississippi, its leaves soft as a newborn's skin. The live oak can grow sturdily on the hottest hills of central California, contrasting dark green against the golden grass. For my money, I'll take the bur oak, the slowest-growing but the strongest of all; even its acorns are heavily armored, ready to do battle with the uninviting soil.

Speaking of money, you may not even need any: Several state and local agencies have embarked upon tree-planting programs, distributing seedlings for free or at a reduced cost. For example, the New York Restoration Project provides trees as part of its goal to help citizens plant and care for one million new trees across New York City's five boroughs, while the Colorado State Forest Service provides access to its nurseries to any local landowner holding one or more acres. Every state university runs one or more large operations called Extension Units, full of experts qualified to give advice and encouragement to citizen gardeners, tree owners, and nature enthusiasts of all types. Call around: these researchers are obligated to provide free consultations to interested civilians regarding your trees, your compost heap, your out-of-control poison ivy.

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 ages 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 the account on tree surgery, put your head down and start over, knowing that your tree is doing the same. The first ten years will be the most dynamic of your tree's life; what kind of overlap will it make with your own? Take your children to the tree every six months and cut a horizontal chink into the bark to mark their height. Once your little ones have grown up and moved out and into the world, taking parts of your heart with them, you will have this tree as a living reminder of how they grew, a sympathetic being who has also been deeply marked by their long, rich passage through childhood.

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.

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.

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 in 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.