Hope Jahren

“All I have ever wanted is one more day in the lab with the people I care about. And every day that I get that, I am grateful.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“The absence of women within STEM programs is not only progressive, it is persistent - despite more than 20 years of programs intended to encourage the participation of girls and women.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The leaves of the world comprise countless billion elaborations of a single, simple machine designed for one job only – a job upon which hinges humankind. Leaves make sugar. Plants are the only things in the universe that can make sugar out of nonliving inorganic matter. All the sugar that you have ever eaten was first made within a leaf. Without a constant supply of glucose to your brain, you will die. Period. Under duress, your liver can make glucose out of protein or fat – but that protein or fat was originally constructed from a plant sugar within some other animal. It’s inescapable: at this very moment, within the synapses of your brain, leaves are fueling thoughts of leaves.”

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

“I spend a lot of time talking to other scientists and writing to other scientists.”

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

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

“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.”

“It's very important to put children in an environment where they can take things apart; where they can break things and then learn to fix them; where they can trust their hands and know their capacity to manipulate objects.”

“A tree's wood is also its memoir.”

“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.'”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”