Hope Jahren was born in a cold town in Minnesota, USA. When she was young, she played in the community college laboratory under her father's charge, accompanying her capable and stern mother to grow vegetables and learn English literature. In order to pay for her tuition when she was in her undergraduate degree, she worked more than ten jobs, and eventually entered a research laboratory to study and work, obtain a degree, and get a teaching position, and build her own laboratory from scratch. She has won three Fulbright Awards and won two young researchers in the field of earth sciences - so far, only four scientists have won this honor, and she is the only woman.
Jahren said, "I have worked in the laboratory for 20 years, and what I have left me is two kinds of stories: stories I have to write and stories I want to write." "However, so far, I can't find an academic magazine that can tell me about the efforts and hardships behind scientific research." In 2016, she published her autobiography "Labor Girl", which records friendship and love, life and career, and cannot be separated from the "laboratory". This book is poetic and beautiful, and has won many book awards. Today's exhibition column specially selected clips of life experiences of Jahren's research on American Pure Seeds when studying for his doctoral studies for readers.
This article is excerpted from the autobiography of biogeologist Hope Jahren (Beijing United Publishing Company), with the title added by the editor. Go to "Bree Pu" and click the "Original Link" at the end of the article to purchase this book. Click "Watch" in "Return to Pu" and publish your thoughts to the message area. As of 12 noon on March 13, 2021, we will select 5 messages, each of which will give you one book.
Written by | Hope Jahren (Professor of the University of Oslo, Norway)
Translator | Jiang Qing (Assistant Researcher at the Institute of Geology and Paleontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
It takes a long time to grow yourself into a scientist. The most risky step is that you have to understand what kind of person is a real scientist, and then take the first step staggering towards the single-plank bridge leading to this direction. This single-plank bridge will become a highway and a highway in the future, and may one day guide you to find your home. A real scientist does not do experiments arranged by others, she will design her own experiments and gain brand new knowledge from them. This is a transformation from "doing what others say" to "telling yourself how to do it", which usually occurs when you pursue a degree and write a paper. From all aspects, it is the most difficult and terrible thing a student has to deal with. Those who can’t do it or don’t want to do it will be eliminated and withdraw from the doctoral program.
On the day I became a scientist, I stood in the laboratory and watched the sun rise. I was sure I discovered something unusual. I waited for a brand new day to tick to a suitable hour so that I could call someone to tell me what I found, although I wasn't sure who I should call.
During my doctoral studies, I studied a tree called Celtis occidentalis, which is the well-known American Pub. It is all over North American , and it is not very good-looking and can be seen everywhere like vanilla ice cream. American purpura is a native species in North America and is now widely grown in cities. Europeans caused countless losses when conquering the new world, and the cultivation of American purpura is a countermeasure to make up for these losses.
American Pu, University of Chicago. by Adam Shaw (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtis_occidentalis Pictures are added by the editor)
For hundreds of years, beetles, like humans, have immigrated from Europe to the United States, walked down ships and docks, and landed in New England's ports. In 1928, a strong beetle with six legs hid itself under the bark of countless elm trees and left the Netherlands to open up new territory. During this period, they brought a deadly fungus into the conduction tissue of each tree. These trees had to close the pipelines in their own vascular system one by one to reduce infection. However, unused nutrients are still stored in the roots of the tree, so they will starve themselves to death by doing so.To this day, Dutch elm disease still rages on land in the United States and Canada, killing tens of thousands of elm trees every year, and the total death toll has reached millions.
and America Park rarely has rivals. It was found that it could withstand early frosts and endure late droughts, and even a few leaves were missing in a year. Elms can grow to 20 meters high, while the American Pu, who succeeded them, is only 10 meters high, and will never be able to look as majestic as the former. The latter only asks for the right amount of things around us, collects us moderate respect, as humble as their bodies.
I am interested in American Pu because their fruits are wonderful. These fruits look like cranberries, but if you pick one up and try to pinch it flat, you will find it as hard as a stone. This is mainly because it is a stone: under the red peel there is a shell that is harder than the oyster shell. This timbered structure is a strong barrier for seeds, helping them pass through the animal's belly and still without any damage, will not rot when exposed to rain, and will fight against the ruthless fungi within the years before the seeds germinate. We can find a large number of pushu fruit core fossils in the sediments of many archaeological sites. After all, each pushu can produce millions of seeds in its lifetime. I hope to invent a way to let me know from these kernel fossils that the average summer temperatures in the Midwest of the Interglacial America.
For at least the last 400,000 years, glaciers have been periodically expanding from the Arctic outward, and then retreating, advancing and retreating like a pendulum. During the brief period of glacially uncovered in the Great Plains of North America, plants and animals migrate, migrate, cross, try new foods and habitats. But how hot is summer in this short period of time? Is it as hot as today's midsummer? Or is the weather slightly warm and it just happens to keep snow from falling? If you have lived in the Midwest of the United States, you will understand that it is important to distinguish between these two temperature conditions. For those who live on the coast, use animal fur to shelter from wind and rain, and live through water and grass, the difference between the two is even greater.
The endocarpment wrapped outside each seed is condensed from the essence of the tree. My thesis tutor and I were able to think of various chemical reactions about the formation of the endocarpment at a specific temperature. Our entire theory about "the 'fossilization' of fruits at specific temperatures" is completely new, but it is also somewhat elusive because we have not yet found the answer to some simple questions. I designed a series of experiments to try to break down a big problem into a series of independent small tasks. The first small task is to study how the seeds of the purplish tree are formed and what their specific composition is.
For this, I toured back and forth between several American squads in Minnesota and South Dakota to compare the fruits in cold and (compared to) in warm environments. I plan to collect the fruits of the purplish tree regularly within one year. After returning to the laboratory in California, I would cut hundreds of such fruits into thin slices like paper, then take a photo with a microscope and describe it.
When I put the core of the Pu Shu in a microscope and magnified it 350 times, I found that under its smooth appearance, it was actually a honeycomb-like structure filled with hard and brittle substances. I immersed a few citrus fruit cores into a kind of acid to observe what would happen next. If peach pits are used as a reference, I am sure that these acidic liquids soaked in the pits can dissolve at least 35 cubic decimeters of peach pits. The substance filled in the honeycomb structure dissolved, leaving only a white mesh-shaped grid. And when I put these tiny white structures into the vacuum chamber and heated to 1500 degrees Celsius, it releases carbon dioxide. This shows that the white grid must contain organic matter - it is another mysterious layer of substance.
A tree will grow a seed. First, spin a layer of wire net on the outside, then put a layer of skeleton on the outside of this net, and finally stuff the peach pit-like ingredients into the mesh. After completing these processes, the tree provides protection for the seeds and gives it a better chance of germination and growth, which may also ensure that it has 90 generations of tree descendants and grandchildren.If we want to get some long-term climate information from these seed fossils, then it is obvious that this white mesh grid is the safe for keeping information. Once I know the composition of the most basic part of the seed, I can get on the right track.
Just as the formation process of each rock is different, the process of cracking and decomposition of each rock is also very different. One of the ways to identify different diagenetic minerals from rocks is to fully crush a sample and then expose it to X-rays. Just look closer and you will find that every grain of salt in the salt tank appears as a perfect cube. If one of them is then ground into extremely fine powder, it will actually be divided into hundreds of smaller perfect cubes. Salt always remains cubes because the atoms that make up pure salt are bound to each other into chemical bond , forming a square lattice, thus forming countless cubes. Any cracks in this structure will break along the weak point of the chemical bond, thus breaking out more small cubes. Among them, the arrangement of each atom is a repetition of the smallest structural unit in the body.
Different minerals have different chemical formulas. A chemical formula can reflect the number and type of atoms contained in a mineral, and can also tell us how these atoms bind. Even if the minerals are ground into fine powder, different minerals will reflect their own differences in shape. If someone could observe the tiny shape of a small pinch of mineral powder—even the heterogeneous powder of an ugly rock with complex composition—it could reason about its chemical formula.
But how can you see the shape of these tiny crystal ? When a wave hits a lighthouse, a back-propagation ripples are generated. The size and shape of this reflective ripple is loaded with information about the waves and lighthouses. If we sit in a small boat that is broken in the distance, assuming that we know the scale, energy, occurrence time, and direction of the impact waves, then we can infer from the form of reflected waves passing through the ship that the base of the lighthouse is round or square. This is very similar to our work of inferring the shape of fine mineral powders: as long as short-wave electromagnetic waves such as X-rays generate reflective ripples, that is, "diffraction" occurs. Film can record the peaks of ripples, and the spacing and frequency of these patterns allow us to reconstruct the shape of the obstacles that turn them back.
X-ray diffraction laboratory is on the other end of the school, from my lab in the past, it takes a whole campus. In the fall of 1994, I was licensed to use X-ray sources in this lab for a while. I am very much looking forward to going there for analysis. This mood is exactly the same as the happy expectation before watching a baseball game: anything can happen, but it may take a while before I can witness the truth.
I thought about it over and over again and finally decided to make an appointment for the evening to use the machine, but maybe it is not the best choice. There was a strange postdoctoral fellow working in that lab. He was so gloomy that made me feel uncomfortable. I've seen him get furious because he was taken a look or someone asked him a small question, and I also like to scare the lonely women who have entered his "sphere of influence". So I was in a dilemma: if I went to the laboratory during the day, I would definitely run into him, but maybe others around me would be "meat shields"; if I went to the university at night, I would probably be able to enjoy the laboratory alone, but if he accidentally came, I would obviously be a living target. Finally, I applied for a midnight shift and carried a 19.05mm ratchet wrench with me. Actually, I don’t know how I should use the wrench to defend myself if I encounter it, but as long as I feel the weight of it in the back pocket of my clothes, I will feel much more at ease.
After I arrived at the X-ray diffraction laboratory, I first put a glass slide on the desktop, then covered it with a layer of epoxy resin fixative, and then sprinkled the ground purpura fruit core powder. I put the sheet into the diffractometer, carefully adjusting the orientation of everything, and then turn on the X-ray source. I connected the recording tape and silently prayed that the invisible ink cartridge was enough, hoping that it could persist in using the complete recording program. Next, I could only sit and wait slowly.
When an experiment cannot be done, it is often impossible to make a big fuss. Similarly, some experiments are something you can't mess up even if you want to. No matter how many times I repeated the measurements, the diffraction angle read by the X-ray meter would have a clear and clear peak at the same place.
My mentor and I thought we would see a clear peak that suddenly rose, which is completely different from the long, flat ink lines we see now. It clearly shows that the mineral here is opal . I stood there, staring at the reading, knowing in my heart that I don’t know, and others won’t misunderstand the result. It's opal, and I've heard of it before. I can lock it firmly and prove it actually exists. I looked at the chart and thought to myself: I didn’t know anything about it an hour ago, but now I know exactly. I recalled this process and slowly understood what changes had happened in my life just now.
The ingredients of these powders are opal! I am the only person who knows about this infinitely expanding universe ! This vast, wide world has so many unimaginable people, and I—even small, despite being imperfect—is special. I am not only a bunch of strange genes, but also a unique individual in the existential sense, because I have discovered the tiny details since the creation, because no one has discovered what I have seen and realized. Opal is the mineral component that strengthens every seed of the turmeric tree! Before I called and told others, this real knowledge was that is a private property that I owned by . Whether this knowledge is valuable is another question and can be left to be discussed later. I stood there, digesting this apocalypse, and my life opened a new page. My first scientific discovery shines—after all, even the cheapest plastic toys will shine when they are newly shipped.
I am just a visitor so I won't touch anything else in the lab. I just stood, looking out the window, waiting for the sun to rise until a few tears slid across my face. I don't know if I cried because I was still not a wife or a mother, or because I lacked the feeling of being a daughter - or because of the beauty shown by the perfect curve on the recording tape, and I can always point to it and say: This is my opal .
My previous work was for this day, and I was waiting for this day. After unraveling this secret, I can also prove something, at least in the end I understand: what is the real research of . But this moment is both satisfying and lonely at the same time. At a more advanced level, while realizing that I can carry out good scientific research, I also understand that in the end, I will never have the chance to become like any woman I know. I will follow without any exception.
In the years after that, I will build a brand new "normal" image for myself in my lab. I will have a brother who is closer than any of my biological brothers: I can call him sooner or later, at any time of the day, and talk to him about topics than I can say that I am embarrassed to talk to any of my same-sex friends. We will enjoy showing our whimsical thoughts to each other and constantly reminding each other, "You are such a living treasure." I will develop a new generation of students, some of whom only seek to attract attention, but there are also a few that can develop the potential I see in them. But that night, I just wiped the tears from my face with my palms. It embarrasses me to cry for something that seems irrelevant or extremely boring to others. I stared out the window and watched the first ray of sunshine shine on the campus in the morning. I don't know, anyone in the world has seen such a beautiful sunrise.
Before noon that day, I knew someone would tell me: Your findings are not special. In fact, there is indeed a scientist older and wiser than me who told me that he had predicted what I found now.I listen politely when he explained to me that what I observed was not a true apocalypse, but just confirming an obvious assumption. He said nothing was OK. Nothing can change the overwhelming sweetness that can be held for a while after discovering a secret - just now, the universe gave me this secret! I have a intuition that since it gives me a little secret, then one day it will give me a big secret.
When sunrise dyed the fog in the San Francisco Bay red glow, I also got rid of my depression. I walked back to the building where I usually work and prepared to start a new day. There is a scent of eucalyptus in the cold air. Later, this taste always reminds me of Berkeley . The campus was still dead silent at this time. I walked into the lab and was surprised to find that the light was still on. Then I saw Bill sitting upright on an old lawn lounge chair in the middle of the room, listening to the chat program scrambling on his small radio, staring at the empty walls.
"Hey, I found this chair in the McDonald's trash," he said to me who walked into the lab, "Looks like it works." He was still sitting upright on the chair, looking at the chair with a satisfied look.
I was really happy to see him. I thought I would have to spend at least several hours alone before I could wait for someone to talk.
"I like it," I said to him, "Can you sit lying down?"
"Not today," he said, "maybe tomorrow." He thought about it and added, "Not necessarily."
I stood aside, thinking, why every word that came out of this guy's mouth was a little weird.
I ignored my Nordic nature and decided to tell him the most important thing I have done so far. "Hey, have you seen an opal's X-ray?" I asked him as I grabbed my own reading.
Bill reached the radio in front of him, took out the 9-volt battery, and directly shut up - the key to turning on the radio was already broken. Then he looked up at me. "I just think I'll wait for something while sitting here," he said to me. "So it's this one." After
found that the core of the purpura contains opal, my next goal was to identify a method to calculate the temperature control conditions when the opal forms in the seeds. The substance that makes up the seed lattice of the Pueraria seed lattice is indeed opal, but the crispy mineral filled in the void is a carbonate called aragonite , which is also contained in the snail shell. We can easily prepare pure aragonite in the laboratory by precipitation crystallization. Mix the two bottles of supersaturated solutions and a large amount of crystals will be deposited in the clear solution, just like droplets condensed in clouds. The isotope chemistry of the crystal is strictly controlled by the temperature, which means that as long as the oxygen isotope fingerprint in a single crystal is measured, we can find the exact temperature when the solution is mixed. If I were asked to do this in the lab, I wouldn't miss it if I did it a hundred times, because it was too simple. My next task is to prove that the formation process can also occur in the tree, and to prove that even if it occurs in the fruit, even if the solution that makes the aragonite crystal form is the sap of the tree, the whole process is basically the same.
guided my professor to write this idea into a 15-page application and submitted it to the National Science Foundation. The peers in charge of review liked this idea, so we got the fund. In this way, in the spring of 1995, I returned to the Midwest and looked for qualified Pu Shu to complete the research. I selected three adult American purses, which grew on the shore of the South Platte River, (South Platte River), , near Sterling, , , , , , , , , , , , and there is a place less than a day drive from them, and friends there have always welcomed me. This place has the bluest and widest sky in the world. Under such a sky, I wondered how to link the ingredients of the river with the ingredients of the puerar seeds of summer and calculate the average temperature of the season.With confidence in achieving success, I surrounded the three trees with a cordon and began to pay close attention to them like a prospective father. I was delighted because I expected the baby to be born, but I could only watch. I was also like a prospective father, and I was confused in the busy center: because in that special summer, none of the three American cucumber trees had blossomed and fruited, and there were no cucumber trees around me.
In this world, nothing can expose human helplessness and stupidity like being entangled in the question of "why the tree does not bloom". Not used to getting close to others? What's the matter! In the end, they were unwilling to bear fruit as I imagined, which was really unacceptable. I went to find myself in , Logan County, Colorado, (Logan County) , the only friend of Buck (Buck) , to analyze the situation. Buck works in a bar at the intersection of the expressway. To be honest, I went there more to blow the air conditioner than to drink beer. But Buck still checked the date of birth on my ID card. He reluctantly admitted that I was "well-maintained as an old woman", and I took this sentence as an invitation and then began to frequently enter and exit the bar. As summer slowly passed, Buck became more and more confused because I bet on America’s Pu’s winning odds were not as good as his chances of winning the lottery. However, although I had ridiculously preached lottery statistics to him before, he also resisted not shave my nose.
Buck grew up on a nearby farm, so I felt an indescribable feeling in my heart, as if he was a complicit in this entire American disaster, or at least he should bear some responsibility for it. "But why don't they bloom? Why is it this year?" I urged Buck to answer these two questions. I have carefully studied the climate information of this place and found nothing special about the weather this year.
"Sometimes this happens. Who should have told you this." The sympathy in his words was cold. Cowboys rarely speak like this.
I am sure that the performance of these trees indicates the twists and turns of my future career. I was very scared and imagined myself standing next to the assembly line, pulling out the pig's hair on the pig's head and cheeks after the pig's body was dismembered, pulling out one after another, pulling out one after another, working for 6 hours a day, just like my childhood friend's mother, working for more than 20 years. "That's not enough," I replied, "there must be a reason."
"Trees don't need a reason, they do it, that's it," Buck suddenly pulled out the tone. "In fact, they did nothing, they were just trees, but trees. Damn, they are not living things, and they are not like you and me." He finally had enough, and my problems annoyed him.
"My old man," he felt frustrated and added, "It's just a tree."
So I left the bar and never went back.
When I returned to California , my heart was filled with the bitterness of failure. "Look, if I had a car and I could drive it across the Concord Bridge (Concord Bridge) , I would say, let's set fire to one of the trees," Bill said, using a lab funnel to gather the remaining residue from the Leshi chip bag. "We want the other trees to watch, and then ask them if they don't want to bloom yet."
Bill is already a regular member of my mentor's lab. He will appear around 4 pm every day and stay in the laboratory for 8 to 10 hours. The specific time depends on his energy status and our needs. We only paid him 10 hours a week, but he didn't care about this. And surprisingly, he was happy to listen to me spend a lot of time talking about my tree every night when we worked together. Before I went to Colorado for the last time, Bill urged me to buy a BB gun and spend a few afternoons to hit the leaves and branches of these trees.
I refused and said to him, "The reason I disagree is not that I am a tree planter, but that I think this method is useless."
"But it can make you feel better," he was very determined, "Believe me."
That summer in Colorado, my plan to collect data was completely shattered, but this whole thing taught me the most important understanding of science: does not do experiments to make the whole world run as you imagined . In the autumn, I licked my wounds while setting a better new goal from the rubble of this disaster. I want to use a new method to study trees, not from the outside but from the inside to the outside. I decided! I want to study why they don't bloom and try to understand the logic of their life operation so that they can be used better for me. This is a better choice than doing it according to my own logic.
From the past to the present, from single-celled microorganisms to dinosaurs, daisies, trees, and people, in order to continue, all life on the earth must be accomplished 5 things: growth, reproduction, repair, energy storage and self-control. When I was 25 years old, I had already foreseen that I would experience the ups and downs of having children, and I would not even really experience it. It’s unimaginable to focus fertility, resources, time, desire and love on my head, although most women end up on that trajectory. In Colorado, I only care about the state that the trees are not showing, but do not observe what they are doing. That summer, things like blossoming and fruiting must have given way to other things, but I didn't notice it. The trees were doing something at the time: When I started to face this fact, I was not far from the truth of the problem.
It is an urgent task to form a new mindset: Maybe I can learn to see the world like plants , put me in the same habitat as them, and think about their operating mechanism. As the closest outsider to their world, how close can I be to their inner world? I began to imagine a brand new environmental science, the world it is based on is not a world where plants exist from our perspective, but a world where we exist from the perspective of plants. I think of the various laboratories I have worked in, the wonderful instruments, reagents and microscopes that have brought me a lot of joy... What kind of "hard science" can I create for the above strange exploration demands?
This kind of exploration is strange and perverted and charming; besides worrying about being "not scientific enough", is there anything else that can stop me? I know that if I told someone that I was studying "what it feels like to be a plant", some people would make fun of me, and others would probably follow me to find out. Perhaps, solid work can consolidate the scientific foundation that is not yet solid. I feel uncertain, but this is the first time I feel the sweet tingling, and this feeling of tension and excitement will accompany me throughout my life. This is a new idea, My first real leaf . Like all the bold seedlings in the world, I will continue to move forward and create it from scratch.
