No matter how much funding I get, I'm always thinking, 'This is temporary. This is fragile. It could all end tomorrow, and how am I going to make today worth it? If this is my last day in the lab, what can I do so that I can walk out of here saying, 'That was a good day?''
— Hope Jahren
Men and women study things differently, and it's not because of our chromosomes. It's a product of our cultural conditioning.
I grew up playing with kids who were the kids of people my parents grew up playing with, and they know me like nobody else. I thought everybody was that way when I was growing up, and then I left to go to college, and I realised that the world is full of strangers.
I think being a scientist is a position of respect and power and access, and it's a privileged position in society. And I think there are fundamental mechanisms that keep men and women from achieving the same level of power and access and privilege in society.
I think we get used to not seeing the green things around us. I think they become the backdrop of our lives. And I think you actively have to ask somebody to request that they put that in the foreground.
Regardless of what humans do to the climate, there will still be a rock orbiting the sun.
For a tree, to endure four months of daylight is like you or I going without sleep for four months.
Corn occupies a really special role in what I've been calling American agro-economics.
Women scientists' hands are like every other woman's hands.
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.
I'm a scientist - a geobiologist who's been studying trees, flowers, seeds, and soil for over twenty years. One day, I realized that I wanted, needed, to tell people - and not just other scientists - about my life in science.
America may say that it values science, but it sure as hell doesn't want to pay for it.
I grew up in a small town.
I spend a lot of time talking to other scientists and writing to other scientists.
A cactus doesn't live in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn't killed it yet.
I love to read stories. And I don't to get to talk about my favorite novels very often in my job.
Women live in a world where we are forced to consider our safety at every turn. We minimize risk while we maximize activity. It's this constant balancing act that we do.
I feel like I'm the same scientist I was back when I couldn't get a grant. Now I'm that same person thinking that same way getting grants. That system of external rewards in science has always mystified me. It's fickle. And I also don't think it was constructed with people like me in mind.
All I have ever wanted is one more day in the lab with the people I care about. And every day that I get that, I am grateful.
Science is so incremental and so full of setbacks and small steps forward. In order to really thrive in this business, you have to be able to glean as much joy from the failure days and from the small increments as you do from the breakthroughs.
If every seed turned into a plant, we'd be living in a very different world.
I think my job is to leave some evidence for future generations that there was somebody who cared while we were destroying everything.
My lab is the place where I put my brain out on my fingers.
I'm interested in how the bare bones of the planet, things that aren't alive, are transformed into things that are alive.
Your bones are not just made of the last meal you had, but the meals that you've had across many years. By looking at the composition of those teeth, researchers can say that something was a large component of the diet. This tells us a lot about how hominins lived and what they ate.
The live oak can grow sturdily on the hottest hills of central California, contrasting dark green against the golden grass.
Every acorn on the ground is just as alive as the three-hundred-year-old oak tree that towers over it.
People love the ocean. People are always asking me why I don't study the ocean, because, after all, I live in Hawaii. I tell them that it's because the ocean is a lonely, empty place.
The type of science that I do is sometimes known as 'curiosity-driven research.' This means that my work will never result in a marketable product, a useful machine, a prescribable pill, a formidable weapon, or any direct gain.
I am a scientist. To be specific, I am a woman scientist. This, I have been told and have come to believe, is a good thing. In fact, it is such a good thing that America needs more of us. Everyone seems to be very sure of this. The thing that no one is sure about, however, is how to make it happen.
In our tiny town, my father wasn't a scientist - he was the scientist, and being a scientist wasn't his job: it was his identity.
My laboratory is like a church because it is where I figure out what I believe.
I think it's very common that scientists or technical people have an artistic side. Sometimes they are very accomplished musicians. Sometimes they have very fine tastes according to art or design. And often, they've spent a big chunk of their childhood or they're growing-up years trying to get in very good at those activities.
Science is performed by people, and it's subject to all the various foibles that plague the rest of our social dynamics.
Women study things in order to figure out how they're connected to other things. I don't know if it's controversial to say that, but that's what I've seen from doing science for a couple of decades.
I always knew how privileged I was to think for a living.
One thing that was very important to me was that I felt comfortable in the lab from being very, very small. I knew that that's where I belonged, and I could fix things and move things. And no matter how many classrooms I went into where I was the only girl in the physics class or whatever, I never questioned the fact that I didn't belong there.
I grew up in a time when there were very few women in the physical sciences. And people started to ask me, 'How did you decide to become a scientist?' And I couldn't really answer. I always knew I'd grow up to have a lab because my dad had one.
The world breaks a little bit every time we cut down a tree. It's so much easier to cut one down than to grow one. And so it's worth interrogating every time we do it.
The wood of any tree growing anywhere records fairly faithfully the oxygen and hydrogen chemistry of the water the plant has access to through precipitation.
My earliest memories are being in the lab, and the way the cement felt and the way it smelled, and the way the countertops looked and it just being this wonderful, warm, happy place where it was just full of toys.
We have to be very careful about acknowledging that the Internet is very good at combatting isolation, but it's not very good at delivering justice.
The turkey oak can grow practically submerged within the wetlands of Mississippi, its leaves soft as a newborn's skin.
Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable.
Ask a science professor what she worries about. It won't take long. She'll look you in the eye and say one word: 'Money.'
I can explain to you in detail just how a tree can be made into paper. But I've always wondered - and hoped - that someday, someone would help me discover how paper can be made back into a tree.
The world is a fickle place, and it's not fair. But if you're getting most of your rewards from you, then you can use that as a kind of compass, and you can be secure in the fact that you're working for the right reason, and you're going in the right direction.
A seed knows how to wait... A seed is alive while it waits.
When I was five, I came to understand that I was not a boy.
I think, as you move to the upper ranks of science - ranks being positions of influence and access - you see fewer female faces. And I think the basic reason is the same reason that you don't see a lot of female faces in Congress or on the Supreme Court or on the directing board of Fortune 500 companies.
