As an example of a woman who had done such breakthrough science, I'd like to cite Dr. Margaret McCully. She discovered, or rather rediscovered, something called soil sheaths, which are neither animate nor inanimate, organic nor inorganic, but a mixture of root cells, soil bacteria and soil particles held together by the equivalent of mucus secreted by the root (2). In these soil sheaths, Dr. McCully found an illustration of what is emerging as a crucial modification of Darwin's theories of evolution: namely, that organisms don't blindly adapt to their environments or die. Rather, organisms interact with the world outside them to create the environment they need for survival.

Dr. Margaret McCully and students Dr. McCully discovered soil sheaths in the context of a regular farm field.

Equally significant are the circumstances under which Dr. McCully made this discovery. She was studying corn in the larger context of a regular farm field. Soil sheaths don't grow in the small seedling pots in which corn is grown in the lab, and if they do at all, they tend to be washed off as scientists follow lab procedure, rigorously separating research materials from their living context. Dr. McCully only discovered her "rediscovery" when she found a drawing dated 1882 demonstrating the existence of the sheaths. This knowledge had gotten lost in the move toward modern laboratory science.

Margaret McCully was doing field work in the first place partly because she grew up on a farm. Although a Ph.D. at Harvard trained her for a life of pure laboratory research, she found herself going against that training. She did this partly because her own farm background kept pulling her back to the larger context in which corn is grown. she told me: "I'd always wanted to go back and apply what I knew to the real thing, corn in the field."

What if the science of life in the border regions between individual organisms in their environment were taken as the root metaphor or model for life? The metaphor might then be of a dialogue between autonomous yet inter-connected and inter-dependent beings.

A second aspect of science through the looking glass is that science as a social process is embedded in personal social relationships. To illustrate this theme, I want to talk about Mileva Einstein Maric.

Mileva Einstein's story dramatically illustrates the liberal feminist theme of the exclusion of women from recognition as scientists. There is considerable evidence to indicate that she, Albert Einstein's first wife, was the co-author of a key paper which won Albert fame and the Nobel Prize for the theory of relativity. Although she was not honoured by the Nobel committee, nor publicly recognized at the time by Albert himself, he sent her the entire Nobel Prize money, a promise he'd made at the time of divorcing her. This only came to light many years after Mileva died in poverty and obscurity (3).

What's more fascinating, however, is to look at Mileva Maric's story from what might be called a cultural-radical feminist perspective. Instead of seeing a woman stripped of recognition as a scientist, consider her as someone pursuing science on her own quite different terms. I think she succeeded on those terms, even though it meant being rendered invisible as a scientist in the terms that caused Albert to be so fulsomely honoured.

Mileva's sense of herself as a scientist was quite in keeping with the conception of science before the influences of industrialism, commoditizing commercialism, and atomistics individualism. Pre-modern science was very much a personal vocation. It was practiced in the domestic sphere, with the living room or "salon" as a major centre of scientific discourse, and with women as well as men acting as patrons of scientists (4).