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" 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.' "
Hope Jahren
Look
You
Science
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" 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. "
Hope Jahren
Parents
Thought
World
" We must feed, shelter, and nurture one another as our first priority, and to do so, we must avail ourselves of our best technologies, which have always included some type of genetic modification. "
Hope Jahren
Nurture
Always
Best
" My father's schooling during the 1930s was heavy with memorization; eight decades later, he is reaping the benefits. "
Hope Jahren
Heavy
Benefits
Father
" In my Scandinavian-American family, we were conditioned never to sit, at least not comfortably. I was endlessly going back to work. We longed for the fleeting respite of being useful and regarded sleep as a reward for exhaustion, always to be deferred until after the sun goes down. "
Hope Jahren
Sleep
Down
Family
" 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. "
Hope Jahren
Me
Tree
You
" America may say that it values science, but it sure as hell doesn't want to pay for it. "
Hope Jahren
Science
Values
Say
" 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. "
Hope Jahren
Life
People
Science
" 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. "
Hope Jahren
People
Science
Think
" 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. "
Hope Jahren
Childhood
Art
People
" 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. "
Hope Jahren
Say
Doing
Women
" The deadnettle is the Punxsutawney Phil of the plant world: short of stature but stout of heart. At the first hint of winter's wane, its stem rises from the ground, and a green, grasping hand of sepals unclenches to divulge two silky-white petals, one of which unfurls straight up toward the sky. "
Hope Jahren
Sky
Short
Heart
" What is a berry? It is an ovary swaddled within a sugary womb. Plainly put, a berry is the fruition of a flower - the ultimate tautology. "
Hope Jahren
Within
Ultimate
Fruition
" When I was five, I came to understand that I was not a boy. "
Hope Jahren
Boy
Understand
I Came
" My experiences have also convinced me that sexual harassment is very rarely publicly punished after it is reported, and then only after a pattern of relatively egregious offenses. "
Hope Jahren
Me
Experiences
Then
" Plants are decisive to a fault. A stem produces a bud that flowers once and once only. It offers pollen that is either dispersed or goes nowhere. One pollen grain either enters a stigma or it falls upon stony ground. An ovum is either fertilized or the whole project stalls out. "
Hope Jahren
Ground
Plants
Project
" 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. "
Hope Jahren
Water
Plant
Growing
" You can pick wild strawberries with your eyes closed, locating them by smell, for they are two parts perfume to one part taste. An hour of searching might yield a handful if you're lucky. Wild strawberries can't be encouraged, nor can they be discouraged: They come to you unbidden and unearned. They appear, or do not, by the grace of the sun. "
Hope Jahren
Eyes
Grace
Sun
" 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. "
Hope Jahren
Men
Women
Power
" 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. "
Hope Jahren
Love
Live
People
" 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. "
Hope Jahren
New
Impression
Neighbor
" I love the quiet forest that stands between my lab and my home. "
Hope Jahren
Home
Forest
Lab
" 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. "
Hope Jahren
Fair
Direction
Kind
" My father was a physicist, while I am a biogeochemist. I live to study plants, and he has never had more than a generic interest in biology. "
Hope Jahren
Father
Biology
Plants
" Like all professors, I also do a lot of extra jobs for which I was never trained, such as advising former students as they navigate the wider world. "
Hope Jahren
Like
Never
Professors
" I love rocks with the unconditional love that you lavish upon a newborn baby. "
Hope Jahren
Newborn
Baby
You
" My laboratory is like a church because it is where I figure out what I believe. "
Hope Jahren
I Believe
Church
Believe
" 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. "
Hope Jahren
Me
Fix
Girl
" A true scientist doesn't perform prescribed experiments; she develops her own and thus generates wholly new knowledge. "
Hope Jahren
Own
She
True
" I am not a farmer; I am a researcher who studies the plants that come to your dinner table, which means that I ask questions for a living. "
Hope Jahren
Questions
Plants
I Am
" When I was 23, my Norwegian relatives taught me how to sit still. During the long sunlit evenings in the summer of 1992, my cousins would lead me across the farm to the edge of the forest, each of us lugging a folding chair. There, in a scraggly bramble of wild blueberries, we would set them down a few yards apart, each in our own little patch. "
Hope Jahren
Me
Farm
Forest