Lab Girl (2016)
Lab Girl is a 2016 biology book written by Hope Jahren.
Hope Jahren grew up in rural Minnesota, playing in her father's community-college labs after dark, and became a geobiologist who has built and rebuilt her own laboratories three times. Her memoir braids two subjects. One is the secret life of trees, seeds, and soil, told with a scientist's precision and open love. The other is her decades-long partnership with Bill, a brilliant and troubled lab mate who follows her from grant to grant across the country. Jahren writes candidly about money, mental illness, and the physical labor of research, and about the rare joy of work shared with someone who understands it.
Quick answers
What is Lab Girl about?
Hope Jahren grew up in rural Minnesota, playing in her father's community-college labs after dark, and became a geobiologist who has built and rebuilt her own laboratories three times. Her memoir braids two subjects. One is the secret life of trees, seeds, and soil, told with a scientist's precision and open love. The other is her decades-long partnership with Bill, a brilliant and troubled lab mate who follows her from grant to grant across the country. Jahren writes candidly about money, mental illness, and the physical labor of research, and about the rare joy of work shared with someone who understands it.
When was Lab Girl published?
Lab Girl was published in 2016.
Who made Lab Girl?
Lab Girl was written by Hope Jahren.
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A few thoughts on Lab Girl
Readers moved by Hope Jahren's love of plants should try The Green Planet, David Attenborough's series that films root and vine at a scale we rarely notice, catching time-lapse struggles for light and water. Fantastic Fungi shares her patient wonder at the living systems working quietly under our feet, and the same conviction that a scientist can love the thing she studies.