Lab Girl

Jahren and her family move to Hawaii in 2008 when Bill is guaranteed salary during the academic year at the University of Hawaii. Outside of their house, Jahren’s son has the habit of beating a palm tree with a baseball bat. Recently, he has taken to bashing the tree 100 times per day to “strengthen his swing” (254). To Jahren, this is a harmless habit and one that does not hurt the palm tree since they contain spongy tissue that absorbs the blows.

Jahren reflects on the deep love she feels for her son. Although she does not have a daughter, she hopes to have a granddaughter one day to experience that kind of love as well. She closes by petitioning: “Someone[…] tell her about the day that her grandmother sat in a sunbeam and dreamed of her to the soundtrack of a tree being flogged” (257).

Jahren and Bill conduct a study on 80 radish plants, monitoring their growth in controlled settings under video surveillance. One plant, C-6 “acted differently from the others while it grew”(260), moving in different patterns than the other plants.C-6 eventually dies, but its behavior represents an intellectual breakthrough for Jahren: “[…] [T]hat small plant growing in a Dixie Cup changed my thinking more than anything I had read within my dog-eared textbooks” (261).