Book Review: Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

Lab Girl

Author: Hope Jahren

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Date of Publication: April 5, 2016

Pages: 304

      Lab Girl is part memoir, part discussion of earth sciences and paleobiology and part discourse on women in male dominated (specifically scientific) fields.  The book is informative, entertaining and humorous, often all at once.  It is extremely well written and thought provoking.

     The author relates her early life growing up with a physicist father and often accompanying him to his laboratory.  She naturally becomes interested in studying the sciences which was relatively unusual for young women in the 1970s.   While in college she worked as a pharmacy technician and became enamored with working in a hospital.  She had this to say about that experience:

"Working in the hospital teaches you that there are only two kinds of people in the world: the sick and the not-sick.  If you are not sick, shut up and help.  Twenty-five years later, I still cannot reject this as an inaccurate worldview."

     Dr. Jahren graduated cum laude from the University of Minnesota and instead of pursuing medicine, obtained a PhD. from the University of California, Berkeley.  Her field of interest is soil science.  She has developed innovative methods of studying fossil forests during a distinguished academic career at Georgia Tech, Johns Hopkins and now at the University of Hawaii.

    In  Lab Girl the author spends alternating chapters illuminating areas of her scientific expertise with how these studies have shaped her life story.  It is intriguing the way that she counterposes chapters describing some area of her plant study with incidents from her personal history which follow the same path.  For example she expounds upon plant habitats:

"A cactus doesn't live in the desert because it likes the desert;  it lives there because the desert hasn't killed it yet.  Any plant that you find growing in the desert will grow a lot better if you take it out of the desert.  The desert is like a lot of lousy neighborhoods:  nobody living there can afford to move."

She also describes living in downtown Baltimore in a reclaimed neighborhood in much the same fashion.  The author finishes her description of desert plant life by describing resurrection plants - small plants which wither and turn brown during drought conditions but rapidly re-hydrate during rain.  She follow up this discussion with a chapter describing her own experience with mania, comparing the human sensations of heightened energy and sensitivity to the to the biologic over activity of the desert resurrection plant during a storm.

     In Lab Girl Dr. Jahren makes her points about women in traditionally male roles without turning the book into a feminist screed.  At one point she notes: "In my own small experience, sexism  has been something very simple: the cumulative weight of constantly being told that you can't possibly be what you are."

     Lab Girl is memoir at its finest.  It was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, a "New York Times" 2016 Notable Book and an Amazon Top 20 book of 2016.  The author is boldly honest as revealed in these quotes:

"My early career had all the makings of a long, slow academic train wreck."   

"I am a female scientist, nobody knows what the hell I am, and it has given me the delicious freedom to make it up as I go along."

"Our world is falling apart quietly.  Human civilization has reduced the plant, a four-hundred-million-year-old life form, into three things: food, medicine, and wood.   In our relentless and ever-intensifying obsession with obtaining a higher volume, potency, and variety of these three things, we have devastated plant ecology to an extend that millions of years of natural disaster could not."

Read Lab Girl.  You will be glad that you did.

Book Review: Pieces of Light by Charles Fernyhough

Pieces of Light

Author: Charles Fernyhough

Publisher: HarperCollins 

Date of Publication: January 7, 2014

Pages: 320

"Memory has its own special kind of truth.  It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies and vilifies also, but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events;  and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own."
- Salman Rushdie

     Developmental psychologist Charles Fernyhough begins the final chapter of Pieces of Light by saying: "I set out to write about some science, and I ended up by telling a lot of stories."  Indeed he did.  In a little over 200 pages this author has concisely summarized current  memory research.  He enlivens the anatomic and statistical facts with colorful anecdotes and stories which help the reader comprehend what all of this research means on a practical level.  In the process, the author encourages us to think differently about memory and : "Thinking differently about memory requires us to think differently about some of the 'truths' that are closest to the core of our selves."

     In his introduction, Fernyhough states "We need our memories, and we find ways of hanging on to them.  According to the conventional 'possession' view of memory, we do that by filing them away in a kind of internal library, ready to be retrieved as soon as they are needed."   He then goes on to say that "The view that I want to explore in this book is that memory is more like a habit, a process of constructing something from its parts, in similar but subtly changing ways each time, whenever the occasion arises."  It is this reconstructive view of memory that he explores throughout the book.

     In successive chapters the author explores how reconstructed memories are very susceptible to distortion by information provided after the event and by bias.  He distinguishes between semantic memory (memory for facts) and episodic memory (memory for events) and how memories from our own lives involve an integration of these two types of memory.

     He also writes about the evocation of memory by certain stimuli.  In particular, he talks about how certain sensory stimulation can evoke very strong memories (or "involuntary memories").  The classic example of this in literature is Proust's memories of his grandmother which were brought about by the smell and taste of Madeleine cakes in his book In Search of Lost Time.  

     This concept of memories as reconstructions has many critical implications.  The legal system is taking this into account.  More and more, the courts are discounting the reliability of eyewitness testimony in favor of more verifiable evidence.  Memory manipulation is a great concern, especially in the arena of child abuse.  There is great interest in this concept of memory reconstruction in the treatment of memory disorders including amnesia, dementia and post-traumatic stress syndrome.  The chapter on PTSD is particularly interesting, especially since this is a relatively new diagnosis (first included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in the 1980s).  The successful use of therapy to refocus the memory of  PTSD patients is fascinating.  

     This book is reminiscent of Malcolm Gladwell's books in that both authors use data and facts which then are augmented by "real world" narratives.  Fernyhough goes further, however, using many personal anecdotes and family stories.  The chapter which describes his interviews with his 90 year old grandmother are touching as well as enlightening.  I also really enjoyed the segments in which Fernyhough uses literature (Proust, of course, as well as many more contemporary authors) to show how different views of memory are portrayed.  Fernyhough also has the advantage over Gladwell in the fact that he is a scientist and a practitioner in the field rather a reporting journalist.  This author obviously had a thorough command of the information and has a real talent for explaining it on a level that the non-psychologist and non-neuroanatomist can comprehend.  

     This is a very enjoyable study of modern memory research which deserves a wide audience.