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" I was a promising graduate student. I landed a position as a professor before I even started to write my dissertation. While I prepared to start my new job, I decided that I would begin by studying the brine that bleeds sideways within the rocks that underlie the inner Aegean region of Turkey. "

Hope Jahren

Rocks

Start

Studying

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" Regardless of politics, our world will continue to change rapidly. "

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

" My life is pretty small. Even as a successful scientist, I'm not a public figure. I like people - I just don't know that many! "

Hope Jahren

Life

Know

" 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. "

" I grew up in a time when there were very few women in the physical sciences. And people started to ask me, 'How did you decide to become a scientist?' And I couldn't really answer. I always knew I'd grow up to have a lab because my dad had one. "

Hope Jahren

You

Grow

" 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. "

" I think there are fundamental power imbalances between the sexes that play themselves out in society. And I think science is just not immune to that - which actually isn't a very controversial stance if you think about it. "

" I grew up in a small town. "

Hope Jahren

Small Town

Town

" Science is performed by people, and it's subject to all the various foibles that plague the rest of our social dynamics. "

" A cactus doesn't live in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn't killed it yet. "

" 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. "

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

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

" The live oak can grow sturdily on the hottest hills of central California, contrasting dark green against the golden grass. "

" I love rocks with the unconditional love that you lavish upon a newborn baby. "

" 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. "

Hope Jahren

Tiny

Father

" Men and women study things differently, and it's not because of our chromosomes. It's a product of our cultural conditioning. "

" 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?'' "

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

" 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 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. "

" I like weeds and hardy plants. "

Hope Jahren

Hardy

Plants

" Women live in a world where we are forced to consider our safety at every turn. We minimize risk while we maximize activity. It's this constant balancing act that we do. "

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