I'm Alan Alder and this is Clear In Vivid. Conversations about connecting and communicating.

The reality is that plants do all the same things we do. You know, they grow, they get sick,

they heal from sickness, they have offspring, they reproduce, they store against future bad

times, they do all the things we do. They just do them very differently than we do. We're kind of

stuck in a different world from them and so a big part of studying plants well is spending a lot

of time imagining. That's Hope Jarrin and boy is she good at imagining. In her book, Lab Girl,

she takes us on a dive so deep into the lives of plants that they come alive in our

imaginations more like fellow creatures than just things that grow. And meanwhile, she weaves

in her own personal story of a life in science. She does this so vividly that we can feel that it's

like not only to be a plant, but to be the scientists who studies that plant. Hope is a professor now

at the University of Oslo. So I was especially delighted that during a trip to New York, she had time

before catching a Yankees game to join me in our Manhattan studio. Hope, this is such a treat for

me to talk to you because I think you're such an extraordinary writer. I you light up the brain

with the way you write. You have this wonderful way of telling your own story so vividly and so

emotionally and telling the story of your science with the same voice, same personal tone. Instead of

talking about it, would you read that section we put in front of you? Yeah. No risk is more terrifying

than that taken by the first rut. A lucky rut 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 rut 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 rutlet has only one chance to guess

what the future years, decades, even centuries will bring to the patch of soil where it sits.

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