REVIEW --- Books -- Five Best: The Human Side of Science --- The author of 'Lost in Curiosity' on tales of lab mishaps, fieldwork adventures and personal sacrifices in the pursuit of truth

“Lab Girl

 

By Hope Jahren (2016)

 

1. Hope Jahren, a geobiologist and plant researcher, describes her laboratory as a refuge, a church and a self-contained world. "I chose science because science gave me what I needed," she writes, "a home as defined in the most literal sense: a safe place to be." In her memoir, "Lab Girl," Ms. Jahren narrates scientific struggles both dramatic and mundane. In one deafening and dangerous laboratory mishap, a glass tube that was overfilled with gas exploded.

 

 A more pervasive source of stress was the battle to secure research funding (at one point she raided university trash bins for materials when money started to run out).

 

The book's throughline is her friendship with Bill, an academic loner whose meticulous work in the field caught her attention. He became Ms. Jahren's steadfast scientific partner -- the two were bonded by their mutual sense of getting away with something. When Bill first saw her small, shabby, mildewed lab space, she was momentarily ashamed. But he only had eyes for the electrical setup in one corner. After considering how he would configure an important device for their research, he delivered his verdict: "completely perfect."

 

The Periodic Table

 

By Primo Levi (1975)

 

2. For Primo Levi, chemistry was a thrilling duel, a "face-to-face match." It pitted the "unfledged, unarmed chemist" on one side, while "on the other side, responding with enigmas, stood Matter." Levi was a young Jewish chemist in Turin, Italy, at the outset of World War II. "The Periodic Table" relates his early research forays and his resistance to fascism in a series of short essays -- translated into English in 1984 by Raymond Rosenthal -- each corresponding to a chemical element. After a short stint fighting alongside anti-Nazi partisans, Levi was captured and sent to Auschwitz. He survived partly by working at a German laboratory. In the chapter titled "Cerium," Levi describes how, wracked with hunger, he stole iron-cerium rods to make flints for cigarette lighters so that he could exchange them for bread. Throughout his recollections, he renders chemistry in physical and intimate terms.

 

A garlicky smell once alerted him to the presence of arsenic in sugar, while the spill of a concentrated solution cut through clothing "like the blow of a scimitar."

 

For Levi, the discipline of science -- which is "clear and distinct and verifiable at every step" -- counters totalitarianism, "a tissue of lies and emptiness."

 

The Quickening

 

By Elizabeth Rush (2023)

 

3. In 2019 nearly 60 scientists and crew members set sail in the icebreaker Nathaniel B. Palmer for Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier. In "The Quickening" Elizabeth Rush calls this river of ice "the biggest wild card" that will determine how sea-level rise will affect coastal communities. The team's ambitious plans to gather ice-sheet data were stymied by storms, a rudder problem, a medical emergency and the threat of ice closing in. Part of what sets Ms. Rush's account apart from other science books is her attention to the crew who performed the essential work of supporting the researchers: mopping the stairwell every morning, cooking dinner during a wild ride through the Drake Passage, a treacherous channel between South America's Cape Horn and Antarctica. The book also reveals the depths of the scientists' emotions about their mission and its consequences, and their awe at the magnificent polar landscape. One researcher tells Ms. Rush how much he'll miss Antarctica after the expedition. "It's like falling in love," he says. "When you leave, you want to see that person again, even though you just left."

 

The Beak of the Finch

 

By Jonathan Weiner (1994)

 

4. Rosemary and Peter Grant, a married pair of evolutionary biologists who studied songbirds on Daphne Major, a small volcanic island in the Galapagos archipelago, are the subjects of Jonathan Weiner's "The Beak of the Finch." Near the islands that were visited by Charles Darwin on the Beagle in 1835, the Grants became so familiar with their avian subjects that they could recognize hundreds of individual finches and the types of seeds in the birds' beaks. What emerges is the story of a scientific family -- the Grants were joined in their work by their daughters and some intrepid students -- faithfully documenting the finches' real-time evolution over nearly two decades as the island was buffeted by drought and storms. When Peter shared their findings with other researchers, a fellow biologist was skeptical of Peter's claim that a tiny difference in beak size could determine whether a finch lives or dies. The other scientist insisted "I don't believe a half of a millimeter really matters so much." Mr. Weiner shows how it does.

 

Ship Fever

 

By Andrea Barrett (1996)

 

5. Tens of thousands of emigrants from Ireland, desperate to escape the famine ravaging their home country, landed in 1847 at the Grosse Ile quarantine station in what is now the Canadian province of Quebec. "Ship Fever," the title novella in Andrea Barrett's collection of short stories, is the tale of a young doctor who, stung by the derision of the woman he loves, offers his services at the station. Once there, he is overwhelmed by his work treating victims of a typhus epidemic, in which some of the shipborne dead are "dropped on the nearest beach and corded like firewood." Throughout these tales, the careers of eminent scientific figures intertwine with the lives of ordinary people. The narrator of "The Behavior of the Hawkweeds" ruminates on her grandfather's childhood encounters with Gregor Mendel, the monk whose experiments with pea plants laid the groundwork for modern genetics. In "Rare Bird" a woman in 18th-century England finds pleasure in the company of a new friend, who helps her test a claim from the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus that swallows hibernate underwater. Barrett's stories portray the practice of science, as one character puts it, "bent by loneliness and longing."” [1]

 

1. REVIEW --- Books -- Five Best: The Human Side of Science --- The author of 'Lost in Curiosity' on tales of lab mishaps, fieldwork adventures and personal sacrifices in the pursuit of truth. Kwok, Roberta.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 29 Aug 2026: C8.