Gerty Theresa Cori, born Gerty Theresa Radnitz on August 15, 1896, in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, stands as one of the most important biochemists of the twentieth century. She was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and only the third woman to win a Nobel Prize in any scientific field. Working in close partnership with her husband, Carl Ferdinand Cori, she helped reveal how the body stores and releases energy from carbohydrates. Their discoveries, especially the Cori cycle and the isolation of glucose-1-phosphate, known as the Cori ester, transformed the understanding of metabolism and laid foundations for later work on diabetes and other metabolic diseases.
Gerty grew up in an upper-middle-class Jewish family. Her father, Otto Radnitz, was a chemist who managed sugar refineries after developing a successful refining method. Her mother, Martha Neustadt, was culturally engaged and a friend of Franz Kafka. Gerty was the eldest of three daughters. She received her early education at home until about age ten, then attended a girls’ lyceum. Girls’ schools of that era rarely offered the Latin, mathematics, physics, and chemistry needed for university. Encouraged by her maternal uncle, a professor of pediatrics, she decided to pursue medicine. In a single intense year she made up years of missing coursework, later calling the university entrance examination the hardest test she ever took. In 1914, at eighteen, she entered the medical school of the German University of Prague, where few women studied.
There she met Carl Cori in anatomy class. They shared intellectual curiosity and a love of the outdoors, hiking and skiing together. World War I interrupted their studies. Carl was drafted into the Austrian army; Gerty worked as an assistant at the medical school. After the war they completed their degrees in 1920 and married the same year, despite opposition from Carl’s family, who feared that Gerty’s Jewish background would harm his career. Gerty converted to Catholicism, but antisemitism in postwar Europe remained a serious obstacle.
They first worked in Vienna, Gerty at the Carolinen Children’s Hospital. Research conditions were poor and political tensions high. In 1922 they emigrated to the United States. Carl took a position at the State Institute for the Study of Malignant Diseases in Buffalo, New York, later Roswell Park. Gerty was hired as an assistant pathologist. They became U.S. citizens in 1928. In Buffalo they published dozens of papers, often jointly, studying carbohydrate metabolism, the fate of sugar in the body, and the effects of insulin and epinephrine. In 1929 they described what became known as the Cori cycle: lactate produced by working muscle is carried to the liver, converted back into glucose, and returned to muscle as fuel. The cycle explained how the body recycles energy during intense activity.
In 1931 Carl was appointed to Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Gerty followed as a research associate because university rules limited faculty positions for spouses and because institutions were reluctant to hire a woman on equal terms. She performed the same laboratory work as her husband yet received a fraction of his salary for many years. Their only child, Thomas Carl, was born in 1936. That same year they isolated glucose-1-phosphate, the Cori ester, an essential intermediate in the breakdown and synthesis of glycogen. They later identified and crystallized phosphorylase and other enzymes that catalyze these reactions, eventually synthesizing glycogen in the test tube. Their work moved from whole animals to isolated tissues and finally to purified enzymes, bringing chemical precision to biology.
Recognition came slowly for Gerty. Carl became department chair in 1946. Gerty was promoted to full professor of biochemistry only in 1947, the same year they shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Bernardo Houssay. The citation honored their discovery of the course of the catalytic conversion of glycogen. Gerty was the first American woman and the first woman in that prize category to be so honored. Additional awards followed: the Garvan Medal, honorary degrees from several universities, and election to the National Academy of Sciences and other learned societies. Their laboratory later trained multiple future Nobel laureates.
Even after the prize, Gerty continued to work. In 1947 she was diagnosed with myelofibrosis, a rare bone-marrow disease. She persisted in the laboratory for a decade, refusing to stop until near the end. She died on October 26, 1957, in St. Louis at the age of sixty-one.
Gerty Cori’s career illustrates both scientific brilliance and the barriers women and Jewish scientists faced. She and Carl insisted on working as equals even when institutions would not treat them as such. Their research showed that the chemistry of life could be dissected with the same rigor applied to simpler molecules. The Cori cycle remains a standard topic in biochemistry and physiology textbooks. Understanding how glycogen is stored and mobilized helped later investigators study glycogen storage diseases and the hormonal control of blood sugar. Gerty Cori’s life combined intellectual daring, partnership, and persistence. She entered a profession that offered women few openings, crossed an ocean to find a place to work, and, despite delayed recognition and illness, helped rewrite the map of human metabolism.