of study is culturally constructed as male, just as male is culturally constructed as distanced and objective. In a moving case study of a scientist at work, Keller demonstrates that this is not the only possible stance. She sees another in the work of geneticist Barbara McClintock, who talked about her relationship to objects of scientific study as one of proximity rather than distance. For McClintock, the practice of science was essentially a conversation with her materials. "Over and over again," says Keller, McClintock "tells us one must have the time to look, the patience to 'hear what the material has to say to you,' the openness to 'let it come to you.' Above all, one must have a 'feeling for the organism.' " 16 McClintock said that the more she worked with neurospora chromosomes (so small that others had been unable to identify them), "the bigger [they] got, and when I was really working with them I wasn't outside, I was down there. I was part of the system. I actually felt as if I were right down there and these were my friends . . . As you look at these things, they become part of you and you forget yourself" (Keller, 1983, p. 117). McClintock came into increasing conflict with the formal, "hard" methods of molecular biology. McClintock was recognized by the scientific establishment, indeed she was awarded the Nobel Prize, only when the formal approach came independently and much later to conclusions that she had derived