COUNTRY OF BIRTH

Then Austria-Hungary (Now Czech Republic)

INDUSTRY

Biochemistry and medicine

TOP ACHIEVEMENTS

Gerty Cori received the Nobel Prize in 1947, along with Carl Ferdinand Cori, her husband, and Bernardo Houssay, an Argentinian physiologist, for their work in the discovery of how glycogen is broken down in human muscle tissue. Gerty was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and the third woman to win in a science category.

EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION

Gerty was born in 1896 to Jewish parents in Prague, then part of the Austria-Hungary regime. Her father was a chemist, and her mother was worldly and cultured. They encouraged Gerty in her pursuit of education. She attended medical school in Prague, where she met Carl Ferdinand Cori. The couple married and moved to Vienna, Austria, where Gerty worked at a Children's Hospital. In 1922, they emigrated to the U.S.

EARLY CAREER

in the U.S., Gerty and Carl worked at the State Institute for the Study of Malignant Diseases in Buffalo, New York. The couple collaborated even though working with a woman was looked upon unfavorably at the time. The two explored carbohydrate metabolism, specifically how glucose is metabolized and the role of hormones in the process. Even though the couple worked as a team, Gerty had a difficult time finding work. Many colleges wanted only Carl, not Gerty. In 1931, Washington University in Missouri offered both of them positions, though Gerty’s salary was a tenth of her husband’s. She was finally promoted to a full-fledged professor several months before she won the Nobel Prize in 1947.

ACHIEVEMENTS IN BIOCHEMISTRY

In 1929, Gerty and Carl proposed the work that would lead to their Nobel Prize: a theoretical cycle, later named the Cori cycle, that describes how the human body breaks glycogen into lactic acid in the muscle tissue and synthesizes other carbohydrates. While at Washington University, they discovered an intermediate compound that enabled the breakdown of glycogen, today known as the Cori ester. Gerty also examined glycogen storage disease and was the first to outline how a defect in an enzyme can lead to a human genetic disease.

RECOGNITION

In addition to winning the Nobel Prize in 1947, Gerty won many awards, including the Midwest Award from the American Chemical Society and the Squibb Award in Endocrinology. She was also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a board member of the National Science Foundation. In 2004, the Washington University laboratory that Gerty shared with Carl was designated a National Historic Chemical Landmark.

ADDITIONAL FACTS

• In 2015, the U.S. Department of Energy named the NERSC-8 supercomputer at Berkeley Lab after Gerty Cori.
• Before winning the Nobel Prize, Gerty was diagnosed with myelosclerosis, a fatal disease of the bone marrow, possibly caused by her work with x-rays. She died 10 years later in 1957.