978-1101874936 Hope Jahren's Lab Girl Is a Refreshingl
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Lab Girl by Hope Jahren, Knopf, New York City, 2016, 304 pages, ISBN: 978‐1101874936 Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl is a refreshingly honest and delightfully energetic memoir. Even though I didn’t pursue a career in the sciences, I identified with Jahren’s recollections of running around and playing in her father’s laboratory as a young girl. Jahren has an impressive resume. A geobiologist, she got her undergraduate degree at University of Minnesota and her PhD at the University of California at Berkeley. She has effectively built three laboratories from scratch, at three different universities: Georgia Tech, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Jahren really is, as the title of her book suggests, a “lab girl.” Her work, in her own words, is not earth‐shattering or life‐changing. She is a geobiologist after all, not a medical doctor trying to cure cancer or Parkinson’s. Her research is purely curiosity driven—any marketable or profitable side effect of her research is a perk, which makes it that much more difficult to secure funding—a struggle which consumes much of the latter half of the book. Having worked in a number of labs funded by government grants, it certainly put things in perspective to hear about the process from one of the people who actually deals with all of the paperwork and all of the stress. Like most memoirs, Jahren’s begins with her childhood in rural Minnesota, where her father was a professor at the local branch of University of Minnesota. She details her youth, playing under and around and eventually on the benches in her father’s lab—to her, the lab was home. So it is no wonder that when she went away to college, she immersed herself in laboratory work, not only in the laboratories of her professors but in the pharmaceutical laboratories of the university hospital, where she learned an important lesson: there are two kinds of people in this world—those who are sick and those who are not, and if you fall in the latter category you better find some way to help. When she went away to Berkeley to get her PhD she met an undergraduate named Bill, a rebel of sorts who was of Armenian descent. Bill then became a steady figure in Jahren’s career—her best friend and her colleague, who helped her build her various labs. Bill even lived out of a van during Jahren’s earliest years at Georgia Tech, when she was only an associate professor and was unable to secure enough funding to pay him a true living wage. The depth of their professional friendship is enviable, and really drives the trajectory of the memoir’s middle section. Given the dearth of narratives regarding the achievements of women in science, save a few token exceptions like Marie Curie or at least recently, Rosalind Franklin, it was nice not only to read about a woman in science, but to read about a woman in science who has the voice to tell her own story. Review by Jeanette S. Ferrara NYU School of Journalism .