Free Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

for barely six months, but I had begun to see it clearly for what it was. This place was a hellhole, I had realized, just as she had been telling me since the first day I met her.
    I augured grandly that someday I would have my own research lab that would be even bigger than the one I was leaving for, and I wouldn’t hire anyone who didn’t care as deeply about the work as I did myself. I completed my speech in a little crescendo of self-importance from chapter ten: it was inevitable that I would be
working with a better heart in my own house…than I could in anybody else’s now.
    I knew that she had heard me, and so I was surprised when she just looked away and took a drag on her cigarette instead of responding. After a moment, she tapped the ash off and continued talking about cars, picking up exactly where she had left off. After we both got off work at 11:00 p.m., I waited around for a bit, but then started toward my apartment on foot.
    It was a clear night and so cold that the snow squeaked underneath my feet as I walked. After I had gone a few blocks, Lydia’s car passed me while I was trudging along and I was stung with a new type of loneliness.
The old unhappy loss or want of something had, I am conscious, some place in my heart
came to me from chapter forty-four. I watched Lydia’s single functioning taillight disappear across the bridge, lowered my head against the wind, and continued to make my own way home.

5
    NO RISK IS MORE TERRIFYING than that taken by the first root. A lucky root will eventually find water, but its first job is to anchor—to anchor an embryo and forever end its mobile phase, however passive that mobility was. Once the first root is extended, the plant will never again enjoy any hope (however feeble) of relocating to a place less cold, less dry, less dangerous. Indeed, it will face frost, drought, and greedy jaws without any possibility of flight. The tiny rootlet has only one chance to guess what the future years, decades—even centuries—will bring to the patch of soil where it sits. It assesses the light and humidity of the moment, refers to its programming, and quite literally takes the plunge.
    Everything is risked in that one moment when the first cells (the “hypocotyl”) advance from the seed coat. The root grows down before the shoot grows up, and so there is no possibility for green tissue to make new food for several days or even weeks. Rooting exhausts the very last reserves of the seed. The gamble is everything, and losing means death. The odds are more than a million to one against success.
    But when it wins, it wins big. If a root finds what it needs, it bulks into a taproot—an anchor that can swell and split bedrock, and move gallons of water daily for years, much more efficiently than any mechanical pump yet invented by man. The taproot sends out lateral roots that intertwine with those of the plant next to it, capable of signaling danger, similar to the way that information passes between neurons via their synapses. The surface area of this root system is easily one hundred times greater than that of all the leaves put together. Tear apart everything aboveground—everything—and most plants can still grow rebelliously back from just one intact root. More than once. More than twice.
    The deepest-growing roots are those of the gutsy acacia tree (genus
Acacia
). When the Suez Canal was first dug, the thorny roots of a scrappy little acacia tree were found extending twelve meters, forty feet, or thirty meters downward, depending on whether you are reading Thomas (2000), Skene (2006), or Raven et al. (2005), respectively. I suspect that the authors of these botany textbooks included the Suez Canal anecdote in order to teach me something about hydraulics, but the story has left me with a dank and dusky false memory instead.
    In my mind it is 1860, and I see a ragged cohort of men stumble upon a living root while they are digging more than one hundred feet