Awards

National Academies - 1897

American Association for the Advancement of Science

About George Peirce

George James Peirce was a botanist known for his work on plant physiology. Peirce was born in Manila, Philippines on March 13, 1868, to American parents George Henry and Lydia Ellen Peirce (née Eaton) and after attending Harvard University earned his M.A. and Ph.D. at Leipzig University. He served as assistant professor of botany at Indiana University from 1895 to 1897, where he was the first to offer a course in bacteriology, and then joined the faculty of Stanford University, where he spent the remainder of his career in teaching and administrative roles, retiring in 1933. He published three textbooks on plant physiology and was one of the first scientists in the United States to trace the source of epidemics to typhoid; in Bloomington, the source of an epidemic was found to be contamination of the water supply and in Palo Alto it was traced to the milk supplied by a local dairyman. Among his books on plant physiology, are Plant Physiology (1903) and The Physiology of Plants (1926) are based on work with a wide range of plants including algae, lichens, liverworts, gymnosperms, and angiosperms. In the 1920s he was appointed a member of a panel commissioned to visit all copper smelters in the United States that handled 1000 tons or more of sulfurous copper per day and to observe their effect on the surrounding vegetation. As a result of this work, Peirce was an expert witness in several suits involving damage to vegetation by fumes from smelters. Peirce was a fellow the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, served as president of the Botanical Society of America in 1932 and was a member of the American Society of Plant Physiologists. He served as member and later chairman of the Palo Alto Board of Health, the City Planning Commission, and the Palo Alto Chapter of the Red Cross. He also served on the Wood Fuel Advisory Commission and was a collaborator with the US Forest Service and the US Department of Justice. Peirce died October 15, 1954.