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

What is a berry? It is an ovary swaddled within a sugary womb. Plainly put, a berry is the fruition of a flower - the ultimate tautology.

A true scientist doesn't perform prescribed experiments; she develops her own and thus generates wholly new knowledge.

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.

I grew up in a time when there were very few women in the physical sciences. And people started to ask me, 'How did you decide to become a scientist?' And I couldn't really answer. I always knew I'd grow up to have a lab because my dad had one.

There is nothing in the world more perfect than a slide rule. Its burnished aluminum feels cool against your lips, and if you hold it level to the light you can see God's most perfect right angle in each of its corners.

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.

I'm a scientist - a geobiologist who's been studying trees, flowers, seeds, and soil for over twenty years. One day, I realized that I wanted, needed, to tell people - and not just other scientists - about my life in science.

My father was a physicist, while I am a biogeochemist. I live to study plants, and he has never had more than a generic interest in biology.

Women live in a world where we are forced to consider our safety at every turn. We minimize risk while we maximize activity. It's this constant balancing act that we do.

Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable.

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.

My laboratory is like a church because it is where I figure out what I believe.

Ask a science professor what she worries about. It won't take long. She'll look you in the eye and say one word: 'Money.'

I can explain to you in detail just how a tree can be made into paper. But I've always wondered - and hoped - that someday, someone would help me discover how paper can be made back into a tree.

My experiences have also convinced me that sexual harassment is very rarely publicly punished after it is reported, and then only after a pattern of relatively egregious offenses.

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?''

The live oak can grow sturdily on the hottest hills of central California, contrasting dark green against the golden grass.

Women study things in order to figure out how they're connected to other things. I don't know if it's controversial to say that, but that's what I've seen from doing science for a couple of decades.

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

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

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.