As scientific practitioners in the U.S. professionalized in the late 19th through the early 20th centuries, one of the derivative privileges they claimed was the authority to speak in nature’s name within public culture. As a practical matter, such communication was largely delegated to intermediaries such as schoolteachers, journalists, and museum workers, who were to serve as a kind of diplomatic corps on behalf of the scientific community to the everyday world. Unexpectedly, diverse configurations of Americans contemporaneously appropriated these intermediary channels to actively re-create the scientific enterprise according to standards, values, and ends that challenged those that professional arbiters had in view. As a case in point, I will sketch out the startling resilience and persistence of a transformative image that proliferated across the changing mediascapes of the 20th century U.S.: that of “the intimate scientist,” a representation that worked to undermine the legitimacy of the view from nowhere. The dimension of the “intimate scientist” formulation that I will highlight here is the recurring theme that it is *where* this scientist lives and works that makes this scientist knowledgeable: that place, surprisingly, is “at home.” Out of this domestic siting a number of consequences flow: among them the accessibility of the scientist to the public; the legitimacy of experiential reality; and a refusal to render the human invisible in the search for scientific knowledge. Prominent as a cultural trope in mass-market magazines during the Progressive Era in tales about the California horticulturist Luther Burbank, the image was elaborated further for mid-century audiences in more sophisticated literary forms in the collaborative writing of John Steinbeck and marine biologist Ed Ricketts in Sea of Cortez (1941), in Steinbeck’s fictionalization of Ricketts in Cannery Row (1945) and Sweet Thursday (1954), and in Rodger and Hammerstein’s adaptations of these works in their musical Pipe dream (1955). The epistemic shorthand of the intimate scientist framework was reformulated for the televisual age in striking terms in the CBS Reports’ documentary The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson (1963) and National Geographic’s Miss Goodall and the wild chimpanzees (1965), demonstrating both its continuing utility and relevance. Using representative examples such as these to identify the intellectual, social, and cultural dynamics that have supported related efforts to re-create science through innovative prototypes advanced through mass-mediated thought-experiments, scholars can begin to better-understand the tensions that have arisen in the American context between professionals and refractory publics in the past and in the present.