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Jessie Isabelle Price (1930-2015)
Jessie Isabelle Price is known for her work as a veterinary microbiologist who developed vaccines to fight off organisms killing ducks and waterfowl. Born on January 1, 1930 in Montrose, Pennsylvania, she was raised by her single mother, Teresa Price who encouraged working hard in school. After attending her predominantly white public schools in the neighborhood, she was accepted into Cornell University.
After graduating high school, Price decided to move to Ithaca, New York to attend another year of high school there to make sure she was prepared for the rigor of Cornell. She was able to advance her studies and her resident status gave her free tuition and required her to pay for housing, books, and non-refundable fees.
Price graduated from the College of Agriculture at Cornell University with a bachelor’s degree in microbiology in 1953. In 1956, she returned to Cornell to earn her master’s degree, graduating in 1959 with a master’s degree in veterinary bacteriology, pathology, and parasitology. That same year she earned her Ph.D. with a dissertation on “Studies on Pasteurella anatipestifer
Infection in white Pekin Ducklings” which was published in the Journal of Avian Diseases.
In 1959 Price also began working as a research specialist at the Cornell University Duck Research Laboratory in Eastport, Long Island. Her research focused on the identification and control of bacterial diseases in commercial white Pekin ducklings. In the next eighteen years in this position, Price found a way to reproduce the disease and began injecting it in into ducks with a vaccine that revealed the different causes of the duck mortality. To present her research, in 1966, Price was given a travel grant from the National Science Foundation to attend the 9th International Congress for Microbiology in Moscow, U.S.S.R.
By 1974, Price had developed two vaccines at the Cornell University Duck Research Laboratory that were commercially used by Pekin duck farmers in Long Island, the Midwest, and Canada. Commercial turkey farmers also used one of her vaccines and a salmonella vaccine was used by commercial pigeon farmers.
In 1977, after her eighteen-year work as a research specialist, Price left the Duck Disease Research laboratory and moved to Madison, Wisconsin to work for the National Wildlife Health Center of the National Biological Service as a research microbiologist. Her work mainly consisted of understanding the interactions between diseases in wildlife and environmental contaminants specifically in waterfowl. Her goal was to identify the microbial diseases to reduce wildlife mortality. In another research project, she was able to determine why some wetlands had a higher frequency of cholera outbreaks. That research led to better control of avian cholera.
Price also served as an adjunct assistant professor between 1963 and 1969 at Long Island University in Westhampton Beach in New York, and between 1969 and 1976 she taught earth sciences as an adjunct professor at Southampton College of Long Island University. Price was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Women in Science and a member of the Committee on the Status of Microbiologists and the Committee of the Status of Women Microbiologists where she served as a chair from 1978 to 1979.
On November 12, 2015, Jessie Isabelle Price died in Madison, Wisconsin the age of 85 from Lewy Body Disease/ Alzheimer’s.
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Jessie Isabelle Price (b. January 1, 1930, Montrose, Pennsylvania – November 12, 2015, Madison, Wisconsin) was a veterinary microbiologist. She isolated and reproduced the cause of the most common life-threatening disease in duck farming in the 1950s and developed vaccines for this and other avian diseases. A graduate of Cornell University, where she earned a PhD (1959), she worked first at the Cornell Duck Research Laboratory and later at the United States Geological Survey (USGS) National Wildlife Health Center. She served as chair of the Predoctoral Minority Fellowship Ad Hoc Review Committee of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), and as president of Graduate Women in Science.
Jessie Price was born in Montrose, Pennsylvania. Her mother, Teresa Price, raised her daughter on her own in difficult financial circumstances. Price was the only African-American in her class, at a school where there were only two other Black students. After graduating from Montrose High School, she was accepted into Cornell University, moving with her mother to Ithaca to take advanced high classes in mathematics and English for a year. Tuition fees were waived because of her New York residency and grades. She wanted to be a physician, but could not because of the cost. Price received a Bachelor of Science in the College of Agriculture in 1953.
Her mentor, Dorsey Bruner, recommended post-graduate studies, but finances prohibited it. Price worked for three years as a laboratory technician in the Poultry Disease Research Farm in the Veterinary College at Cornell to save for further study. She obtained research assistant support for 1956 to 1959, receiving a Masters in 1958, and a doctorate in 1959, supervised by Bruner. Her Master's thesis was "Morphological and Cultural Studies of Pleuropneumonia-like Organisms and Their Variants Isolated from Chickens".
For her doctoral dissertation, Price isolated and reproduced the bacterium, Pasteurella anatipestifer, in white pekin ("Long Island") ducklings infected with a disease that was a major killer among duck farmers at that time. Her dissertation was published by Cornell University in 1959.
After her PhD, Price joined the Cornell Duck Research Laboratory, where she worked from 1959 to 1977, teaching at Long Island University, where she became an adjunct professor. She worked on developing a vaccine, undertaking trials of mixed flocks of vaccinated and unvaccinated ducklings, working every day, and conducting daily autopsies. In 1964, Ebony magazine featured Price and her work in an extensive photo-essay describing and showing her work on vaccine development, in the Duck Research Laboratory and on the farm. Price described the heavy workload, made more onerous by the four-mile distance between the laboratory and farm where the flocks of ducklings were managed.
Long Island "New Duck Disease" is an infectious disease affecting primarily ducklings, with a high mortality rate. In 1956, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported that it was "the most important disease problem of the duck industry", with losses of up to 75% of populations. For her doctoral work, Price isolated and reproduced Pasteurella anatipestifer, an essential step for vaccine development.
While at the Cornell Duck Research Laboratory, she began working on vaccine development for Pasteurella anatipestifer for white pekin ducks, which she would continue in avian cholera and tuberculosis (TB) for various species through her career. Some of the vaccines were commercially developed. She worked with national and international colleagues, publishing on Pasteurella anatipestifer in pheasants, medication for bacterial infections in ducklings, Pasteurella multocida in Nebraska wetlands and in snow geese.
In 1966, Price was awarded a National Science Foundation travel grant to present her findings at the International Congress for Microbiology in Moscow. By 1974, she had developed an injectable vaccine and was moving on to studying oral vaccination. She moved to the USGS National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin in 1977, and the study of environmental contaminants and diseases in wildlife, especially water fowl.
Her professional activities included serving as chair of the Predoctoral Minority Fellowship Ad Hoc Review Committee of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), as well as its Summer Research Fellowship and Travel Award Program. Price was also a member of the ASM's Committee on the Status of Minority Microbiologists and its Committee on the Status of Women Microbiologists. She was also active in Graduate Women in Science (also called Sigma Delta Epsilon), serving as national president from 1974 to 1975, after being national second vice-president (1972-1973), as well as on the national board of directors (1976-1980).
Price was a dog-lover and breeder, with a prize-winning Corgi in the 1960s. Her other favorite pastimes were photography, music, and travel.
Price died of Lewy body dementia on November 12, 2015, in Madison, Wisconsin, and was buried in Quoque Cemetery on Long Island.
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