I love the quiet forest that stands between my lab and my home.

Men and women study things differently, and it's not because of our chromosomes. It's a product of our cultural conditioning.

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 it's very common that scientists or technical people have an artistic side. Sometimes they are very accomplished musicians. Sometimes they have very fine tastes according to art or design. And often, they've spent a big chunk of their childhood or they're growing-up years trying to get in very good at those activities.

I grew up playing with kids who were the kids of people my parents grew up playing with, and they know me like nobody else. I thought everybody was that way when I was growing up, and then I left to go to college, and I realised that the world is full of strangers.

I'm interested in how the bare bones of the planet, things that aren't alive, are transformed into things that are alive.

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.

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

When I was 23, my Norwegian relatives taught me how to sit still. During the long sunlit evenings in the summer of 1992, my cousins would lead me across the farm to the edge of the forest, each of us lugging a folding chair. There, in a scraggly bramble of wild blueberries, we would set them down a few yards apart, each in our own little patch.

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.

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.

While both plants and animals awaken via distinct changes in metabolic functioning, most plants prefer to err on the side of caution, waiting for hints of full-on summer before they bloom.

I spend a lot of time talking to other scientists and writing to other scientists.

The type of science that I do is sometimes known as 'curiosity-driven research.' This means that my work will never result in a marketable product, a useful machine, a prescribable pill, a formidable weapon, or any direct gain.

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.

Even a very little girl can wield a slide rule, the cursor serving as a haft.

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.

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

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.

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

I love to read stories. And I don't to get to talk about my favorite novels very often in my job.

I like weeds and hardy plants.

Science is so incremental and so full of setbacks and small steps forward. In order to really thrive in this business, you have to be able to glean as much joy from the failure days and from the small increments as you do from the breakthroughs.

I love the quiet forest that stands between my lab and my home.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

I grew up in my father's laboratory and played beneath the chemical benches until I was tall enough to play on them.

I am a scientist who studies plants. I like plants. I think about plants almost every hour of the day, and several hours of the night as well.

Corn occupies a really special role in what I've been calling American agro-economics.