Words matter. These are the best Hope Jahren Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I spend a lot of time talking to other scientists and writing to other scientists.
If every seed turned into a plant, we’d be living in a very different world.
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.
Women study things in order to figure out how they’re connected to other things. I don’t know if it’s controversial to say that, but that’s what I’ve seen from doing science for a couple of decades.
The deadnettle is the Punxsutawney Phil of the plant world: short of stature but stout of heart. At the first hint of winter’s wane, its stem rises from the ground, and a green, grasping hand of sepals unclenches to divulge two silky-white petals, one of which unfurls straight up toward the sky.
People love the ocean. People are always asking me why I don’t study the ocean, because, after all, I live in Hawaii. I tell them that it’s because the ocean is a lonely, empty place.
Science is performed by people, and it’s subject to all the various foibles that plague the rest of our social dynamics.
I grew up in a time when there were very few women in the physical sciences. And people started to ask me, ‘How did you decide to become a scientist?’ And I couldn’t really answer. I always knew I’d grow up to have a lab because my dad had one.
My experiences have also convinced me that sexual harassment is very rarely publicly punished after it is reported, and then only after a pattern of relatively egregious offenses.
I think the best learning is done with active manipulation. And we need to be able to work with our hands; it’s not just about using our brains.
Like all professors, I also do a lot of extra jobs for which I was never trained, such as advising former students as they navigate the wider world.
While both plants and animals awaken via distinct changes in metabolic functioning, most plants prefer to err on the side of caution, waiting for hints of full-on summer before they bloom.
Men and women study things differently, and it’s not because of our chromosomes. It’s a product of our cultural conditioning.
Plants are not like us, and the more you study plants, the more different and deep ways you see that they are not like us.
I like weeds and hardy plants.
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.
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.
A seed knows how to wait… A seed is alive while it waits.
One cannot rule out a blizzard in Minnesota after Labor Day, and so when I travel for Thanksgiving or any time in the fall, I am careful to fly into Des Moines instead of Minneapolis and then drive the 200 miles north to my hometown.
As an environmental scientist, I think our first need is to feed and shelter and nurture. That has always required the exploitation of plant life, and it always will.
I am not a farmer; I am a researcher who studies the plants that come to your dinner table, which means that I ask questions for a living.
My earliest memories are being in the lab, and the way the cement felt and the way it smelled, and the way the countertops looked and it just being this wonderful, warm, happy place where it was just full of toys.
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.
When I was five, I came to understand that I was not a boy.
My laboratory is like a church because it is where I figure out what I believe.
My father was a physicist, while I am a biogeochemist. I live to study plants, and he has never had more than a generic interest in biology.
What is a berry? It is an ovary swaddled within a sugary womb. Plainly put, a berry is the fruition of a flower – the ultimate tautology.
The type of science that I do is sometimes known as ‘curiosity-driven research.’ This means that my work will never result in a marketable product, a useful machine, a prescribable pill, a formidable weapon, or any direct gain.
There is nothing in the world more perfect than a slide rule. Its burnished aluminum feels cool against your lips, and if you hold it level to the light you can see God’s most perfect right angle in each of its corners.
I always knew how privileged I was to think for a living.
I think my job is to leave some evidence for future generations that there was somebody who cared while we were destroying everything.
I’m interested in how the bare bones of the planet, things that aren’t alive, are transformed into things that are alive.
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 there are fundamental power imbalances between the sexes that play themselves out in society. And I think science is just not immune to that – which actually isn’t a very controversial stance if you think about it.
The evasion of justice within academia is all the more infuriating because the course of sexual harassment is so predictable. Since I started writing about women and science, my female colleagues have been moved to share their stories with me; my inbox is an inadvertent clearinghouse for unsolicited love notes.
I grew up playing with kids who were the kids of people my parents grew up playing with, and they know me like nobody else. I thought everybody was that way when I was growing up, and then I left to go to college, and I realised that the world is full of strangers.
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.
In New England, the pin oak thrives, its leaves tipping to a thorny point in a good-natured impression of its evergreen neighbor, the holly bush.
I think being a scientist is a position of respect and power and access, and it’s a privileged position in society. And I think there are fundamental mechanisms that keep men and women from achieving the same level of power and access and privilege in society.
My life is pretty small. Even as a successful scientist, I’m not a public figure. I like people – I just don’t know that many!
