Gaping at a seed almost invisible to the naked eye through a microscope in a cold and quiet lab over several nights does not sound like something an aspiring writer would do.
But for American geobiologist Hope Jahren, author of 'Lab Girl', this was the routine she followed over and over again -- and which finally gave the scientist her own, true identity.
Her autobiography traces a woman scientist's life from being a curious child in her scientist father's lab to becoming a successful university professor and researcher.
The book, launched in India recently, has been making waves. It explores the author's personal and career growth parallel to that of a plant, as she fights against gender discrimination.
Jahren, whose roots are Scandinavian, grew up in the US with three older brothers. One of her earliest realisations about herself, she writes in the book, revolved around the fact that she was a woman in a world dominated by men.
As a child, she would spend long hours in her father's laboratory. She was five when she thought "whatever I was, it was less than a boy".
Looking back at those early days, Jahren writes how she spent the day "pretending to be a girl" and transformed into a scientist in the evenings.
"While I pretended to be a girl I spent my time deftly grooming myself and gossiping with my girlfriends about who liked whom and what if they didn't... But in the late evenings I would accompany my dad to his laboratory, when the building was empty but well lit. There I transformed from a girl into a scientist, just like Peter Parker becoming Spider-Man, only kind of backward," she writes.
The feeling of being the only woman or being a minority in the scientist fraternity continued to haunt her as she grew up.
She records episodes where she was told "you can't possibly be what you are".
"Then I cringed as, one by one, the people to whom I was being introduced sized me up and down, each of them wearing a look with which I was very familiar. It was the look that says, 'Here? That can't be right; there's a mistake here somewhere.'"
Public and private organisation all over the world have studied the mechanics of sexism within science, she points out.
"In my own small experience, sexism has been something very simple: the cumulative weight of constantly being told that you can't possibly be what you are," she writes.
From her first real research finding till she became a mother, the 47-year-old scientist, a professor at Oslo University, always found a connection between the important incidents of her life and her own her line of work.
In the autumn of 1994, Jahren found that the most basic part of a Hackberry fruit's seed pit was made of opal. It was an incident that the author felt changed her life.
"While looking at the graph, I thought about how I now knew something for certain that only an hour ago had been an absolute unknown, and I slowly began to appreciate how my life had just changed.
She recalls how she stood and looked out of a window, waiting for the sun to rise.
"...Eventually a few tears ran down my face. I didn't know if I was crying because I was nobody's wife or mother- or because I felt like nobody's daughter- or because of the beauty of that single perfect line on the readout, which I could forever point to as my opal," she says.
Years later, after a long and painful pregnancy clouded by suicidal depression, she would hold the baby in her arms and see her second opal in him.
"When I wake, I hold my baby and I think about how he is my second opal that I can forever draw a circle around and point to as being mine," the scientist mother states.
Originally published by Alfred A Knopf, the book also chronicles Jahren's relationship with her friend and colleague Bill and her scientist husband Clint Conrad.
Disclaimer: No Business Standard Journalist was involved in creation of this content
