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1-Page Summary of Lab Girl

Overall Summary

Prologue

People always ask Hope Jahren why she doesn’t study the ocean, since she lives in Hawaii. She responds that the ocean is a lonely place, while land is much more lively: 200 trees to every person and they have long lifespans. Once she discovered this fact, plant life became her focus of study.

In this passage, the author is telling readers to look out their windows. When they do so, most people first notice man-made things like buildings and cars. However, we should focus on something else: plants. Plants have been around for over 400 million years before humans ever existed. Now that we’ve looked at plants, let’s focus on a single leaf—something that humans can’t make but are responsible for destroying every decade or so by cutting down forests in France’s size (roughly).

The author, Hope Jahren, looks at a lot of leaves and asks many questions about them. She analyzes things like color, shape, size and texture. She then urges the reader to look at their own leaf and ask some of the same questions. And with that she says that they are now scientists. The author disagrees with people who demand that one must know math or physics in order to be considered a scientist because it’s not required for housewives or biblical scholars to know Latin so why should it be required for scientists? Math is helpful but observation is what makes you a scientist.

Part 1: Roots and Leaves

Jahren spent her evenings in the lab with her father, playing with the scientific instruments he had. She liked to use a slide rule as a sword and imagined herself in the story of Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac. She played around with gas pipes, test tubes and other miscellaneous tools that she found lying around in drawers. Jahren also tested various liquids for pH levels such as spit, water, root beer and urine. Having these grown-up items made Jahren feel special because they were hers alone to use along with her father’s labs.

Author Rebecca Solnit and her father walk home every night at 8 P.M. while they live in the small town of southern Minnesota. This is a habit she has learned from her Scandinavian ancestors, who moved to Minnesota after leaving Norway in the 1880s due to bad conditions there. She notes that this might be why Scandinavians tend not to talk much about their personal history, although she can understand it because things must have been tough for them when they first arrived here.

The author’s hometown is located in the south of Minnesota. The town has a community college where her father worked for 42 years. Most people have lived there all their lives, as did their parents and grandparents. She walks with her dad to school every day, and passes by the church where her parents met, married and had children baptized; also the office of doctor who delivered her when she was born. Jahren can’t remember a time when she didn’t know everyone that she passed on walk home from school each day, but it wasn’t until college that she realized how small-town life really was compared to other places in the world.

The slaughterhouse is another important part of the town. The majority of the families in town are employed there or somehow associated with it. Jahren notes that it processes around 20,000 animals per day and sends them to Saint Paul on a train at 8:23 P.M., which can be heard from her house when she walks home from school. In hindsight, while her fingers hurt because they were so cold, she knew that once she got inside her house, it would feel like an entirely different kind of cold awaited her there.