The scientist in her labyrinths

Lab Girl 

Hope Jahren 

Hachette 

370 pages; Rs 499

There are books that leave an indelible impression because they are beautifully written, and there are books that change the way you look at certain things. The two categories are not mutually exclusive. But it is rare for the same book to check both boxes. 

Lab Girl is one of those rarities. It won the prestigious American National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography in 2016, showcasing some of the best writing ever centred on science. It is best described as the intensely personal memoir of a working scientist. 

Great autobiography can arise from a variety of circumstances. The greatness simply lies in keeping the reader engaged. To take some examples. A poet of colour working as a prostitute (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings); a youngster earning a living as a debt-collector (Angela’s Ashes); a half-mad visionary remaking the Middle East (The Seven Pillars of Wisdom); a gay Jewish neurologist struggling to fit in with his eccentric family (Uncle Tungsten). These are all very different memoirs by very different authors. All would qualify as great.  

Lab Girl makes that list. Readers who have never been inside a lab, who cannot distinguish between a Venus Flytrap plant and Donald Trump’s wig will still be captivated by the combination of passion and precision Ms Jahren brings to her job. 

In the baldest of professional terms, she is a “Professor of Biogeochemistry at the University of Oslo”. This puts her at the cutting edge of a field combining several disciplines. She has worked earlier in several prestigious academic posts and she has won three Fulbright Awards. 

Ms Jahren examines plants and soil and rocks and deduces the complicated chemical history of botany and biology. She was the co-creator of an analytical technique that “sniffs” residues of an improvised explosive device, analyses the components and throws up clues about the IED’s provenance. That project happened because she needed money to fund some other stuff she wanted to do. So she wrote a proposal, received a grant from the defence establishment and delivered on that, while using the funds to moonlight on the other projects. 

Some things take this book well beyond the normal competent description of a certain kind of science, fascinating as that is. One is simply an absence of the banal. Across 360-odd pages, Ms Jahren has managed the feat of avoiding writing a single unmemorable sentence. 

It is tempting to quote copiously because the prose is so beautiful. Sample this description of churning out scientific jargon: “I have become proficient at producing a rare species of prose which very few people can read and nobody ever speaks. Its streamlined beauty is a form of artifice.... It does not show the painstaking months of redoing data, when a graduate student quit sneering that she did not want a life like mine. The paragraph that took five hours to write, while riding on a plane stunned with grief, flying to a funeral.... The early draft that my toddler covered with crayons and applesauce.”

Another unusual quality is her ability to transmit her passion. She says, “I can work all night to analyse a rock that is a hundred million years old because I need to know what it’s made of before morning.” She can lose herself in the lab: “My Lab is a place where the lights are always on. It is the place where I put my brain on my fingers and do things. I stand, walk, sit, fetch carry, climb and crawl. There are warnings and rules. I wear gloves, protective glasses. 

Every object in my lab exists for a reason, even if that purpose has not yet been found.”  

Ms Jahren is manic-depressive. She hails from a distant, dysfunctional family in rural Minnesota. The sole industry in Austin (Minnesota) was (and is) a massive slaughterhouse that supplies the entire state. There is snow on the ground nine months of the year. Her father taught physics and earth sciences at the local college. The early grounding in science came from helping her father. 

Every family in Austin hailed from Norway and many of her neighbours were related to her. Her family embodied Ibsen-ian reserve. They rarely spoke to each other, sometimes going silent for days. Even an enquiry as casual as “How are you” was considered an invasion of personal space. Her mother was always angry — for reasons her daughter only figured out much later Ms Jahren left town to study English. Short of cash, she landed a gig working for the pharmacy in a hospital. That was where she had her epiphany and realised that she wanted to do science. (She tried writing an essay analysing “The use and meaning of heart in David Copperfield” and copped out at Chapter 38.)   
 

The story carries on from there. She raids Salvation Army stores for camping equipment; she gathers mould in the Arctic; she writes about the incredible things plants do. In one brief page-turning day, she changed my perspective on green things. 

In a word: read.