Lab Girl is a triumphant tale of a scientist who succeeds in becoming a researcher and creating her own lab, against the odds for a woman struggling against a male-dominated research culture. Her writing about the natural world is remarkable, full of passion – so what’s to complain about? I read the book because I noticed it appeared in recommender lists as a good description of research culture. It certainly provided insights, but my response was not, I think, as the author intended. There is no question of Hope Jahren’s commitment: she would repeatedly work all night, and she would think nothing of spending her last savings on the purchase of necessary kit, but her manic devotion to research at all costs struck me as frightening in its intensity, and frequently irresponsible. In her single-minded determination to complete experiments, she places the lives of her students in danger – and repeatedly belittles them. Her long-standing research assistant puts up with homelessness and constant relocating to enable her to do her work. Her book is a sobering description of research culture.
When I saw the public markers of success she has (one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, and the recipient of three Fulbright Awards), I wondered if those who awarded her were aware of her research culture.
How research works for Jahren
Jahren practices what she describes 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 material gain” [p122]. This means as well that she is unlikely to get any external funding from commercial companies, and you feel her sense of pride that she is doing blue-sky research. The mind of the researcher is clearly stated:
Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume, and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life. It has also convinced me that carefully writing everything down is the only real defense we have against forgetting something important that once was and is no more, including the spruce tree that should have outlived me but did not. [p29]
My lab is a place where I can be the child that I still am … I can work all night to analyze a rock that’s a hundred million years old, because I need to know what it’s made of before morning … Because the outside world cannot come into the lab, the lab has become the place where I can be the real me. [p19]
Plus, she describes well the arcane practices necessary for science writing:
When documenting our work, we “hypothesize” but never “guess”; we “conclude,” not just “decide.” We view the word “significant” to be so vague that it is useless but know that the addition of “highly” can signify half a million dollars of funding. [p25]
Jahren makes it clear that science is, for her, a matter of individual triumph. Yet this is not a disinterested love of knowledge. Although she has a lab, her interest, her obsession, on the basis of this book, is in her own projects, not in any kind of pedagogy or nurturing. She makes it clear that she achieved what she did by herself, so others should demonstrate the same autonomy. Students are a minor irritation, and routinely criticised:
The students will come and go, they’ll be what they are, some hopeful and some hopeless, but we won’t get attached. This is about me and Bill and what we can do together. All the rest of it is nothing more than background noise.[p162]
By then the students and postdocs had filtered in, making the whole place confused and busy. [p260]
Even during her pregnancy, she is critical of the students accompanying the consultant examining here:
I see one of the students standing in the back yawn massively while looking right at me [p221]
Jahren demands total submission from her research assistants. Newcomers to her lab would be given a mindless routine task of labelling empty vials, and they were then told that the exercise had been a waste of time, just to test their attitude:
Any sign that the newbie regarded his or her time as of any value whatsoever was a bad omen, and the loss of so many hours’ work was a telling trial of this principle. [p252]
This is bullying, without a doubt. Jahren clearly feels the need to counter the sexism in research culture by adopting the worst aspects of the male culture she had to face. Hence her story is both an indictment of the unnecessarily stressful research culture she had to face, but also a clear indication of her adopting the same bullying attitude. Those who had to endure fagging at public schools in Britain often used to console themselves that they could later mete out the same punishment themselves. She describes in appalling detail a manic road trip to a conference where one of the postdocs she persuaded to come with her crashed the car because of the icy conditions. She later describes it as “the San Francisco conference that we had nearly killed ourselves getting to”, but the truth is that she was responsible for the decisions that endangered the lives of her students – all for the sake of her delivering a paper.
Jahren is unashamedly elitist, only interested in the most gifted students. To be precise, and even more appalling, she is only interested in students with a manic approach to research that matches hers. You would describe it as macho; one role played by her assistant Bill is to share politically incorrect abuse of people and things around them. On a field trip, she and Bill ignore the rest of the party and go off to do research by themselves. They have no interest in sharing ideas or, it seems, results.
What motivates Jahren? Prestige, even to the extent of, it seems, having Bill, a gifted researcher, devoting his entire life in the cause of her scientific triumphs. This is slavery, no more or less.
Sadly, Jahren writes in an inspired fashion when it comes to her subject, trees; they are described in glowing, almost loving, anthropomorphic terms:
In order to accumulate all of the soil nutrients that thirty-five pounds of leaves require, our tree must first absorb and then evaporate at least eight thousand gallons of water from the soil. That’s enough to fill a tanker truck. [p121]
Trees are at the worst disadvantage because they cannot roam the landscape in search of the water that they need – and because they are large, they need a great deal more than the animals that can move.
Yet although she writes compellingly about trees, the impression I get is that there is a fierceness behind her attitudes that comes from her assertive and unsatisfying relations with humans. The expectation is that humans are against her, while trees and plants are her friends. Although I loved her depictions of the natural world, I was disturbed that it had to fit into this strange, warped set of values.
Lab Girl is a highly readable book, a narrative against the odds. But it must make alarming reading for any early career researcher wanting to try out lab work.
Leave a Reply