[2] She was educated at Wycombe Abbey School, and then achieved a first-class honours in natural sciences (biochemistry) from Newnham College, Cambridge in 1932.

She completed her PhD at the biochemical laboratory in Cambridge under the professorship of Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins.

[citation needed] In 1939, for her postdoctoral work, Pirie joined a team at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund's Mill Hill laboratories, led by Ida Mann.

[6] By 1947 Pirie succeeded Mann, as a Margaret Ogilvie Reader in Ophthalmology, and was elected to a professional fellowship at Somerville College, Oxford.

Pirie would go on to establish the International Committee for Eye Research and become the first woman to receive the Proctor award in 1968.

In 1957, in collaboration with nine working scientists – physicists, geneticists, physicians, and biologists, she edited Fallout to publicise the dangers which at that time the government was tending to minimize or conceal.