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" Corn occupies a really special role in what I've been calling American agro-economics. "

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" In our tiny town, my father wasn't a scientist - he was the scientist, and being a scientist wasn't his job: it was his identity. "

" I think plants present an opportunity for people to look closely at something and get invested in something that's truly very much outside of themselves. "

" I think, as you move to the upper ranks of science - ranks being positions of influence and access - you see fewer female faces. And I think the basic reason is the same reason that you don't see a lot of female faces in Congress or on the Supreme Court or on the directing board of Fortune 500 companies. "

" 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. "

" I'm interested in how the bare bones of the planet, things that aren't alive, are transformed into things that are alive. "

" I grew up in a small town. "

" 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. "

" I think my job is to leave some evidence for future generations that there was somebody who cared while we were destroying everything. "

" My father was a scientist, and I grew up in his laboratory. Maybe I am like him, but he is not like me. "

" My lab is the place where I put my brain out on my fingers. "

" No matter how much funding I get, I'm always thinking, 'This is temporary. This is fragile. It could all end tomorrow, and how am I going to make today worth it? If this is my last day in the lab, what can I do so that I can walk out of here saying, 'That was a good day?'' "

" Every acorn on the ground is just as alive as the three-hundred-year-old oak tree that towers over it. "

" 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. "

" You can't drive through Iowa and not think about farming: No less than 85 percent of the land in the state is devoted to farms, many of them more than 1,000 acres. This is the place where seeds are sown. It's where farmers grow the corn that will be fed to pigs as grain or fed to you as syrup or fermented to ethanol for your gas tank. "

" 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. "

" There is nothing in the world more perfect than a slide rule. Its burnished aluminum feels cool against your lips, and if you hold it level to the light you can see God's most perfect right angle in each of its corners. "

" A tree's wood is also its memoir. "

" There is a fundamental and culturally learned power imbalance between men and women, and it follows us into the workplace. The violence born of this imbalance follows us also. We would like to believe that it stops short of following us into the laboratory and into the field - but it does not. "

" 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. "

" We have to be very careful about acknowledging that the Internet is very good at combatting isolation, but it's not very good at delivering justice. "

" 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. "

" When I was five, I came to understand that I was not a boy. "

" 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. "

" My earliest memories are being in the lab, and the way the cement felt and the way it smelled, and the way the countertops looked and it just being this wonderful, warm, happy place where it was just full of toys. "

" A true scientist doesn't perform prescribed experiments; she develops her own and thus generates wholly new knowledge. "

" I love the quiet forest that stands between my lab and my home. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" During the mid-1990s, I collected thousands of hackberry fruits from trees all across the Midwest. I chemically analyzed each seed in order to formulate an equation relating the hackberry's mineral makeup to the summer temperature under which it grew. "

" Science is so incremental and so full of setbacks and small steps forward. In order to really thrive in this business, you have to be able to glean as much joy from the failure days and from the small increments as you do from the breakthroughs. "