Cori, Gerty Theresa (1896-1957), was the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. In 1947, she and her husband, Carl F. Cori, shared the prize with Argentine researcher Bernardo A. Houssay 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 scientists 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. The couple’s later work concentrated on a group of diseases called glycogen storage disorders.
Gerty Theresa Radnitz was born on Aug. 15, 1896, in Prague, now in the Czech Republic but then in Austria-Hungary. She received an M.D. degree from the German University of Prague in 1920 and married Carl Cori, a fellow student, that same year. She worked at a children’s hospital in Vienna from 1920 to 1922 and then went to the United States with her husband. They both did research at the New York State Institute for the Study of Malignant Diseases (now Roswell Park Memorial Institute) in Buffalo, New York. The Coris became U.S. citizens in 1928. In 1931, Carl Cori accepted the chairmanship of a department at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and Gerty Cori became a research associate there. She became a professor of biochemistry at the university in 1947, after winning the Nobel Prize. She died on Oct. 26, 1957.
Gerty and Carl Cori were the third husband-and-wife team to share a Nobel Prize. The first two were Marie and Pierre Curie, who won the physics prize in 1903, and Frederic Joliot and Irene Joliot-Curie, who won the chemistry prize in 1935.
