Cori, Carl Ferdinand (1896-1984), was an American biochemist who made important discoveries about how foods are used and stored in the body. Cori worked closely with his wife, Gerty T. Cori. In 1947, the Coris shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with Argentine researcher Bernardo A. Houssay. All three scientists were honored for their studies of carbohydrate metabolism, the process by which the body changes such foods as sugars and starches into energy.
The Coris focused on how the body stores excess carbohydrates in the form of a starchlike compound called glycogen and then, when energy is needed, turns glycogen back into a form that the cells can use. The two researchers traced the complex steps involved in the conversion of glycogen and revealed for the first time the part played by enzymes, special proteins that speed chemical reactions.
Cori was born in Prague, now in the Czech Republic but then in Austria-Hungary. He met his future wife at the German University of Prague, where they both were medical students. They married in 1920, shortly after receiving their M.D. degrees.
In 1922, the Coris went to the United States to take research positions at the New York State Institute for the Study of Malignant Diseases (now Roswell Park Memorial Institute) in Buffalo, New York. The couple became U.S. citizens in 1928. In 1931, Carl Cori accepted the chairmanship of the Department of Pharmacology at Washington University Medical School in St. Louis, Missouri. Gerty Cori received a research position at the university, and the two continued their work together. Carl Cori remained at Washington University until he retired in 1966.
