Award winning author, biologist speaks to honors, AP students

Hope Jahren, the award-winning author of Lab Girl, came to Omaha to speak about her experiences as a biologist and as a writer on Sept. 20. The Omaha Public Library Foundation hosted Jahren for two days, one for her hour-long lecture about being a woman in the science field and the other for being the keynote speaker for an OPL fundraiser.

Jahren is first and foremost a scientist, but became famous due to her first book Lab Girl. Her memoir is about the reality of being a woman in the science field, her love for trees and how she became a scientist. “I became a scientist just really out of raw interest…my earliest memories are in a lab,” she said during the lecture. Her story is full of truth and interesting details about her life, but trees are woven into the narrative constantly. “I love plants because they outlive us, they outnumber us, half of their mass is below the surface, they weigh two tons on average [for trees] and they are different from us,” she said.

Jahren was always called to promote the STEM fields for girl, but she “…was never comfortable with the idea,” she said. She then thought about the real reason why people aren’t joining STEM fields: “No one knows what a scientist’s life was like.” So, she decided to fix that by writing her own memoir, telling the true story of a scientist. “Writing a memoir was not really hard,” she said, when thinking about the process of writing Lab girl, “Since much of a scientist job is writing daily observations and research papers.” Due to her writing experience, powerful testimony, and overwhelming love of trees; her memoir was a huge success. It became a national bestseller, New York Times Notable Book, Winner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science/ Subaru for Excellence and more. Amazon called Lab Girl “An illuminating debut memoir…that will forever change how you see that natural world.”

The actual event came to a total of about 200 teacher, students, and librarians. In fact, Tracy Rumbaugh, a biology teacher at Central, offered to increase a test grade by .5 a point if her AP or Honors biology students came to the event. During the event she talked about what she does as a scientist, how trees are amazing and how they work compared to other organisms. She also showed a video of a growing plants illustrating her point that plants move, albeit slowly, and compete for resources. During the Q&A session, students asked about what her favorite plant to work with was (radishes due to ease for experimentation), what her favorite part in high school was (identifying 30 different types of trees in her town, and why trees are more closely related to humans than the average water plant (both trees and humans are long-living multicellular organisms, while the average water plant is not).

Although Jahren is a renowned writer, she is still a scientist at heart. “I’m a scientist. I study plants…because they are life form, they are alive,” she states simply. When she spoke to the students and teachers in the auditorium, her passion for her work was clearly evident in every word and gesture. For students who are planning to go into the science field, she urges them to just “find what you love [in science], figure out why, and do it.” She knows there will be challenges courses that aren’t interesting but she just encourages to “Gut it out in the areas you don’t like and reward yourself with the work you love.”