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Hello, and welcome to this late audio Book Club for the month of May 2016. I'm Slate's words correspondent, Katie Waldman, and I'm joined in the New York studio by Laura Miller, a books and culture columnist for Slate.

Hey, Laura.

Hi.

And by Susan Matthews, our new science editor. Hey, Susan. Hi, Katie.

Okay. Well, today we will be talking about Hope Jaron's beautiful memoir Lab Girl and hopefully

not talking about the fact that Donald Trump is the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party.

But that is sort of happening in the background. Anyway, when we talk is the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party.

But that is sort of happening in the background.

Anyway, when we talked about when breath becomes air, we discussed a little bit about what it was like reading the words of people who saw themselves as educators as well as writers or artists.

And I asked everyone to highlight something that they learned about science or medicine from Paul Kalanithi.

So I'm going to do the same thing here, actually, to start off and ask if you guys have any favorite plant facts that you learned from this book. That's an interesting question. For me, what was great about this book was less what I learned about plants than what I learned about what it's

like to do science. So, for example, the fact that she has to, every three or four years, write

these grants to fund this entire project and to pay Bill her longtime scientific sidekick.

And that to me, like the kind of ad hoc nature of doing science was like a revelation to me that is probably bigger than any of the plant stuff.

I love the plant stuff, but I actually like the science stuff more.

What about you, Susan?

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