Book review

Lab Girl by Hope Jaren, was one book which allured me with the title & synopsis to buy it from one of the corners in Kitab Khana, Mumbai. It kept laying on my bookshelf for months until the lockdown freed my mind to wallow in it.

This book is a memoir of a woman scientist Hope Jahren, from her days as a little girl under the lab benches to a roller coaster journey of pursuing her niche subject of environment, along with the sense of kinship with rest of the world. Every page you turn makes the plant world have conversations with you. As a reader you start looking at seeds, plants & trees as conversations with friends. We start understanding their movements as feelings with connotations in daily routines.

For me personally, Hope Jaren was a flashback to my lab girl days at National Chemical Laboratory, Pune coping up with the peculiar world of researchers & innovations. It reminded me of my admiration of the scientist I worked for as well as the aspirations to become one. Jaren’s book so precisely captures enthusiasm, passion & peculiarities of research fellows & aspiring scientists.

‘People are like plants, they grow towards light...’ as I read these words of Jaren, she made me nostalgic about my moments as a research fellow in NEERI, where the scientist I worked for  inspired me to look with a bird’s eye view to environmental science as a way to light up common man’s understanding of science.

Jaren’s struggle comes out as passion & at times over enthusiasm, to find something the way one wishes it should be & finally to accept the way it is.

‘A seed knows how to wait...Each beginning is an end of a waiting...each of us is given one chance to be...’ and many such similar words of Hope Jaren draws the reader to understand plant science & her work. This book is a story of Hope’s struggle to establish herself as a woman scientist to fight & fund this niche science. While telling her story this lab girl drops in precious secrets of passion for work & love, and how mountains can move when these two things come together.

I recommend this book to all who aspire to make competitive contributions in the fields of environmental science, naturalists & researchers, as well as those who give up hope while struggling for their passion of natural sciences. For them, as Jaren presents her story, from one scientist to another!