Faculty Book Pick: Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

by Hope Jahren • Published 2016 • Knopf

A scientist writes about what doing science actually feels like from the inside: the obsession, the uncertainty, the collaboration, and the moments when the world gives up its secrets to someone who is paying attention.

Hope Jahren is a geobiologist. She has built three university laboratories and spent her career studying plants, soil, and the way the living world responds to what we do to it. Lab Girl is the story of that career told from the inside: the experiments, the failures, the friendship with her lab partner, and the particular kind of obsession that drives someone to spend thirty years asking questions that do not have easy answers.

It is also, unexpectedly, one of the most beautiful books written in English in the last decade. Jahren writes about science the way most people write about falling in love. The effect is disorienting in the best possible way.

"Read this before college. It will change how you understand what science actually is."

Why This Book for Woodlawn Students

The reason I recommend Lab Girl to Upper School students is not because Hope Jahren is a great scientist, though she is. It is because of what she makes visible: that the real work of any inquiry, scientific or otherwise, is the willingness to stay with a question long after the initial excitement has faded.

That is exactly what the Woodlawn Arc asks of students. Inquiry leads to Integration leads to Immersion. The students who do that work seriously, who stay with their Capstone question through the months when it is hard and unresolved, will recognize something of themselves in Jahren's account of what it feels like to be in the middle of research that has not yet yielded its answer.

Lab Girl is also a book about friendship and about the conditions that allow someone to do their best work. Those are themes that resonate differently at 16 than they will at 26, which is one of the reasons I think it is worth reading now and keeping on the shelf.

Who Should Read It

Any Upper School student who has ever felt the pull of a subject that does not fit neatly into a single class period. Any student who is wondering whether a career in science, writing, or research is something they could actually do. Any student who wants to read something that will expand what they think is possible.

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