Dorothy Price

Dorothy Price (1899–1980) was an American physiologist and endocrinologist. She is best known for her discovery of the principle of negative feedback in endocrine axis regulation, in work done alongside Carl Moore. She is considered one of the early pioneers in the field of neuroendocrinology.

Biography Price was born in Aurora, Illinois in 1899, and received her Bachelor of Science from the University of Chicago in 1922. Searching for work, she was offered a position as a histological technician in the lab of endocrinologist Carl R. Moore, who was studying sexual development at the time. In 1947, she became an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, nearly 25 years after entering the department as a technician. and served on many editorial and review boards. The negative feedback framework would later be expanded to include the hypothalamus by Geoffrey Harris, and is currently considered a "cornerstone" of endocrinology. Later, Price would be quoted saying that at that time, "women were not really considered scientifically equal to men", Moore was a "male chauvinist" but "did not realize the depth of his own prejudice".

Later in her career, Price studied sexual differentiation and development. She extended the organizational-activational hypothesis, showing that fetal androgens can "masculinize" the brain and lead to male sexual behavior in rodents.