It’s not often that an award-winning scientist writes a massive best seller, but that’s exactly what geobiologist Hope Jahren has done with Lab Girl, her unforgettable memoir of life in the trenches of modern laboratory research. Brought up in the lab of her dad, a professor at a small college in rural Minnesota, Jahren has risen through the ranks from her beginnings as a PhD candidate at Berkeley to posts at Georgia Tech, the ‘University of Hawai‘i, and now the University of Oslo, where she continues her work using stable isotopes to study fossil forests dating to the Eocene. Her marvelous, enchanting book weaves together her experiences as a hardworking yet sensitive young woman battling through the tradition-bound protocols of hard science with stunning, imaginative descriptions of plant life in all its wondrous variety.
Lab Girl is this year’s UCSB Reads book, which means that hundreds of free copies were distributed to students at Davidson Library in January, and multiple events have been held since to encourage people from every part of the campus and the community to discuss their impressions of Jahren and the book. The project reaches its climax on Tuesday, April 3, when Jahren arrives at Campbell Hall to deliver a lecture and meet her readers. I spoke with her by phone from her office in Oslo last week.
Lab Girl is a hit, and you’ve been traveling in support of the book. What’s the response been like? I get a lot of reader mail; I thought I was the only one who writes to authors! You have to write a book for its own sake, and you have to let it go once it is done, so what comes first is that it becomes just what I want it to be. But I do love that people stopped to write me. That means that I got the voice right.