Lab Girl by Hope Jahren Page B

the smartest one in the class. We need him in the lab.”
    My advisor looked back at the tools he was sorting. “Uh-huh. And how do you know that?” he asked me.
    “I don’t know it,” I said, “but I feel it.”
    As usual, my advisor relented. “Okay, go ahead, but you have to do the paperwork. I’m already way too overloaded, so he’s your responsibility. You are the one who is going to keep him busy, got it?”
    I nodded gratefully. I was newly excited about the future, but I didn’t quite know why.
    Three days later, when we finally rolled back into town after the trip’s end, it was my job to drop the students off, finally bringing them home with their gear. Bill was the last to be delivered, and it was late at night as I pulled up to the BART station that he’d requested.
    I mentioned the possibility of a job to him. “Hey, I don’t know if you are interested, but I could set it up for you to work in the research laboratory where I work. For money and everything.”
    There was no immediate reaction to my statement. He looked down and after a moment he said gravely, “Okay.”
    “Okay, then,” I agreed.
    Bill continued to sit and stare at his feet while I waited for him to get out of the car and say goodbye. Presently he looked up and then out of the window for several more minutes while I wondered what could be keeping him.
    Finally, Bill turned around and spoke to me: “Aren’t we going to the lab?” he asked.
    “Now? You want to go now?” I smiled at my new friend.
    “I’ve got nowhere else to go,” he said gamely, and then added, “and I’ve got my own shovel.”
    As happens at odd moments, a scene in a book that I had read came back to me and I thought again of Dickens, but this time
Great Expectations.
I thought about Estella and Pip at the end of the story, and about how they stood exhausted but hopeful within a dusty garden, tasked with rebuilding a ruined house. I thought about how even though neither character knew what to do next, they could see no shadow of being parted.

7
    THE FIRST REAL LEAF is a new idea. As soon as a seed is anchored, its priorities shift and it redirects all its energy toward stretching up. Its reserves have nearly run out and it desperately needs to capture light in order to fuel the process that keeps it alive. As the tiniest plant in the forest, it has to work harder than everything above it, all the while enduring a misery of shade.
    Folded within the embryo are the cotyledons: two tiny ready-made leaflets, inflatable for temporary use. They are as small and insufficient as the spare tire that is not intended to take you any farther than the nearest gas station. Once expanded with sap, these barely green cotyledons start up photosynthesis like an old car on a bitter winter morning. Crudely designed, they limp the whole plant along until it can undertake the construction of a true leaf, a
real
leaf. Once the plant is ready for a real leaf, the temporary cotyledons wither and are shed; they look nothing like all the other leaves that the plant will grow from this point forward.
    The first real leaf is built using only a vague genetic pattern with nearly endless room for improvisation. Close your eyes and think of the points on a holly leaf, the star of a maple leaf, a heart-shaped ivy leaf, a triangular fern frond, the fingery leaves of a palm. Consider that there can easily be a hundred thousand lobed leaves on a single oak tree and that no two of them are exactly the same; in fact, some are easily twice as big as others. Every oak leaf on Earth is a unique embellishment of a single rough and incomplete blueprint.
    The leaves of the world comprise countless billion elaborations of a single, simple machine designed for one job only—a job upon which hinges humankind. Leaves make sugar. Plants are the only things in the universe that can make sugar out of nonliving inorganic matter. All the sugar that you have ever eaten was first made within a leaf. Without