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.

In my Scandinavian-American family, we were conditioned never to sit, at least not comfortably. I was endlessly going back to work. We longed for the fleeting respite of being useful and regarded sleep as a reward for exhaustion, always to be deferred until after the sun goes down.

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.

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 was a promising graduate student. I landed a position as a professor before I even started to write my dissertation. While I prepared to start my new job, I decided that I would begin by studying the brine that bleeds sideways within the rocks that underlie the inner Aegean region of Turkey.

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.

We must feed, shelter, and nurture one another as our first priority, and to do so, we must avail ourselves of our best technologies, which have always included some type of genetic modification.

We must continue as in millennia past, nourishing the future as we feed ourselves and, each year, plant only the very best of what we have collectively engineered.

Even a very little girl can wield a slide rule, the cursor serving as a haft.

I grew up in my father's laboratory and played beneath the chemical benches until I was tall enough to play on them.

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.

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 have learned that nothing gets readers so fired up as saying something everyone knows is true.

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!

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.

I think plants present an opportunity for people to look closely at something and get invested in something that's truly very much outside of themselves.

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.

Science is performed by people, and it's subject to all the various foibles that plague the rest of our social dynamics.

I love to read stories. And I don't to get to talk about my favorite novels very often in my job.

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

In our tiny town, my father wasn't a scientist - he was the scientist, and being a scientist wasn't his job: it was his identity.

I spend a lot of time talking to other scientists and writing to other scientists.

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.

I grew up in a small town.

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

The turkey oak can grow practically submerged within the wetlands of Mississippi, its leaves soft as a newborn's skin.

Women scientists' hands are like every other woman's hands.

We have to be very careful about acknowledging that the Internet is very good at combatting isolation, but it's not very good at delivering justice.

Your bones are not just made of the last meal you had, but the meals that you've had across many years. By looking at the composition of those teeth, researchers can say that something was a large component of the diet. This tells us a lot about how hominins lived and what they ate.

The wood of any tree growing anywhere records fairly faithfully the oxygen and hydrogen chemistry of the water the plant has access to through precipitation.

My lab is the place where I put my brain out on my fingers.

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

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.

I think my job is to leave some evidence for future generations that there was somebody who cared while we were destroying everything.

I think we get used to not seeing the green things around us. I think they become the backdrop of our lives. And I think you actively have to ask somebody to request that they put that in the foreground.

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.

One thing that was very important to me was that I felt comfortable in the lab from being very, very small. I knew that that's where I belonged, and I could fix things and move things. And no matter how many classrooms I went into where I was the only girl in the physics class or whatever, I never questioned the fact that I didn't belong there.

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.

I always knew how privileged I was to think for a living.

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.

Men and women study things differently, and it's not because of our chromosomes. It's a product of our cultural conditioning.