One of Nader's best known contributions was in writing the at the time highly controversial "Up the Anthropologist--Perspectives Gained From Studying Up" in 1969, which was "one of the first calls to anthropologists to think more about the 'study of the colonizers rather than the colonized, the culture of power rather than the culture of the powerless, the culture of affluence rather than the culture of poverty.'" This call led many anthropologists to begin to "study up," although many misinterpreted Nader's call and did not simultaneously study "down" and "sideways." Nader's works for the field of anthropology and discipline have led her to be described as "the embodied moral conscience of post-Boasian American anthropology.". Her interest in the anthropology of science has developed throughout her career.