HOPE JAHREN

You can pick wild strawberries with your eyes closed, locating them by smell, for they are two parts perfume to one part taste. An hour of searching might yield a handful if you're lucky. Wild strawberries can't be encouraged, nor can they be discouraged: They come to you unbidden and unearned. They appear, or do not, by the grace of the sun.

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.

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.

For a tree, to endure four months of daylight is like you or I going without sleep for four months.

America may say that it values science, but it sure as hell doesn't want to pay for it.

When I was 23, my Norwegian relatives taught me how to sit still. During the long sunlit evenings in the summer of 1992, my cousins would lead me across the farm to the edge of the forest, each of us lugging a folding chair. There, in a scraggly bramble of wild blueberries, we would set them down a few yards apart, each in our own little patch.

Regardless of politics, our world will continue to change rapidly.

When I was five, I came to understand that I was not a boy.

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.

My father was a scientist, and I grew up in his laboratory. Maybe I am like him, but he is not like me.

I feel like I'm the same scientist I was back when I couldn't get a grant. Now I'm that same person thinking that same way getting grants. That system of external rewards in science has always mystified me. It's fickle. And I also don't think it was constructed with people like me in mind.

My father's schooling during the 1930s was heavy with memorization; eight decades later, he is reaping the benefits.

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.

I am a scientist. To be specific, I am a woman scientist. This, I have been told and have come to believe, is a good thing. In fact, it is such a good thing that America needs more of us. Everyone seems to be very sure of this. The thing that no one is sure about, however, is how to make it happen.

It's very important to put children in an environment where they can take things apart; where they can break things and then learn to fix them; where they can trust their hands and know their capacity to manipulate objects.

A cactus doesn't live in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn't killed it yet.

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.

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 it's very common that scientists or technical people have an artistic side. Sometimes they are very accomplished musicians. Sometimes they have very fine tastes according to art or design. And often, they've spent a big chunk of their childhood or they're growing-up years trying to get in very good at those activities.

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.

No matter how much funding I get, I'm always thinking, 'This is temporary. This is fragile. It could all end tomorrow, and how am I going to make today worth it? If this is my last day in the lab, what can I do so that I can walk out of here saying, 'That was a good day?''

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.

I think, as you move to the upper ranks of science - ranks being positions of influence and access - you see fewer female faces. And I think the basic reason is the same reason that you don't see a lot of female faces in Congress or on the Supreme Court or on the directing board of Fortune 500 companies.

Regardless of what humans do to the climate, there will still be a rock orbiting the sun.