Pickford, Grace E. | Studies on the Digestive Enzymes of Spiders

An uncommon offprint by noted endocrinologist Grace E. Pickford (1902-1986). An attractive and fresh copy, the contents unopened.

Pickford was educated at Cambridge and Yale, and taught at Albertus Magnus College, Yale, and Hiram College. Taking advantage of the Yale Peabody Museum’s extensive natural history collections, she became an authority on cephalopod systematics and in 1951 joined the Galathea deep-sea expedition to study rare octopods in the Indo-Malayan region. During the 1940s she began researching the killifish, and it became the organism “on which she established her outstanding work on fish endocrinology. She became interested in the growth rings on fish scales, and the examined effects of the newly developed growth hormone upon the endocrine system of the fish. In the process, she developed a number of techniques adapted from paediatric research and her earlier work on invertebrates. Pickford published a seminal monograph, The Physiology of the Pituitary Gland of Fishes (1957), which soon became the bible for scientists working on the endocrinology of lower vertebrates” (Ogilvie, Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science, p. 1021).