Jessie Isabelle Price

Jessie Isabelle Price (January 1, 1930 – November 12, 2015) 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 gained a PhD, she worked and later at the 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. Price describes the heavy workload, made more onerous by the four-mile distance between the laboratory and farm where the flocks of ducklings were managed.

Price died of Lewy body dementia on 12 November 2015 in Madison, and was buried in Quoque Cemetery on Long Island. 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 TB for various species through her career. medication for bacterial infections in ducklings, Pasteurella multocida in Nebraska wetlands and in snow geese.