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" I grew up in my father's laboratory and played beneath the chemical benches until I was tall enough to play on them. "

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" While both plants and animals awaken via distinct changes in metabolic functioning, most plants prefer to err on the side of caution, waiting for hints of full-on summer before they bloom. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Even a very little girl can wield a slide rule, the cursor serving as a haft. "

" Your bones are not just made of the last meal you had, but the meals that you've had across many years. By looking at the composition of those teeth, researchers can say that something was a large component of the diet. This tells us a lot about how hominins lived and what they ate. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The evasion of justice within academia is all the more infuriating because the course of sexual harassment is so predictable. Since I started writing about women and science, my female colleagues have been moved to share their stories with me; my inbox is an inadvertent clearinghouse for unsolicited love notes. "

" 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. "

" My laboratory is like a church because it is where I figure out what I believe. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" A seed knows how to wait... A seed is alive while it waits. "

" 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. "

" Women scientists' hands are like every other woman's hands. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I grew up in a small town. "

" The world breaks a little bit every time we cut down a tree. It's so much easier to cut one down than to grow one. And so it's worth interrogating every time we do it. "

" 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. "

" I think we get used to not seeing the green things around us. I think they become the backdrop of our lives. And I think you actively have to ask somebody to request that they put that in the foreground. "

" If every seed turned into a plant, we'd be living in a very different world. "

" I always knew how privileged I was to think for a living. "