Florence
Peebles was born in Pewee Valley, Kentucky in 1874.
She attended Girls Latin School in Baltimore, Maryland as a child.
Later she received degrees from Woman's College of Baltimore (1895),
Bryn Mawr College (1900), the University of Halle, the University of
Wurzburg, and the University of Freiburg. She began her academic
career at Bryn Mawr College as an instructor of biology. She also
worked at Tulane University, Lawrence and Clark, and California
Christian College during her career.
Peebles research was focused on studies of regeneration in lower organisms. In particular, she studied the hydra. From her studies, she learned that tissues which had originally been differentiated into tentacles could be reorganized to behave as through they were part of the lower body of the hydra. She hypothesized that an animal's or cell's characteristics could be modified by external factors. She suggested that the response that a tissue makes to regeneration is determined by prior exposure to conditions it encountered during its development.
For her career-long studies, she was awarded an LL.D. degree by Goucher College in 1954. Florence Peebles died of a stroke in a convalescent home in Pasadena, California in 1956.
References
Kass-Simon, G. & Farnes, P. (1993). Women of Science: Righting the Record. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Library of Congress (1980). National Union Catalog. A Cumulative Author List Representing Library of Congress Printed Cards and Titles Reported by Other American Libraries. Washington, DC. the author.
McKeen Cattell, J. (1980). American Men of Science: A Biographical Dictionary. Lancaster, PA: Science Press.
Ogilvie, M.B. (1993). Women in Science: Antiquity through the Nineteenth Century. A Biographical Dictionary with Annotate Bibliography. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.