Laboratory Diary

What if a diary could contain all of chemistry?

Laboratory Diary is Deborah García Bello’s most ambitious book yet. The science communicator has made chemistry a way of searching for meaning and beauty. Through fragments that move back and forth in time, she creates a diary guided by ideas. She weaves together different formats—first-person narrative, scientific essays, poetry, and brief notes—to reflect the complexity and contradictions of life.

The smell of a house, a kiss, a grandmother’s dinnerware, or a stormy day—in short, everyday life—becomes the starting point for revealing the invisible beauty of matter. Science, experience, and thought intertwine in a nonlinear process filled with unexpected associations, fruitful mistakes, and discoveries. Chemistry is explained with rigour and clarity, yet emerges naturally between the lines as a lucid way of seeing the world.

Observation, hypothesis-building, doubt, and analysis, all deeply rooted in the scientific method, engage here in a dialogue with emotions, love, intuition, relationships, deeply held beliefs, and social logic. A book for those who are curious not only about science, but also about how knowledge is created.

With precise, luminous, and profoundly human writing, Deborah García Bello shows us that everything is made of the same elementary particles that have travelled through time and space, formed stars, and now make up our breath: an atomic genesis that leaves room for the mystery of the transcendent. An unconventional book with a demand that is as simple as it is radical: pay attention.