Gerty Cori

Gerty Radnitz was born August 15, 1896, in Prague, then part of Austria-Hungary, to Otto Radnitz, a chemist who managed a sugar refinery, and Martha Radnitz, who moved in circles that included Franz Kafka's family. Tutored at home until sixteen, she decided to become a physician and crammed eight years of Latin and five each of science and mathematics into a single year to pass the medical school entrance exam. The German medical school of Prague's Charles-Ferdinand University admitted her in 1914; she met fellow student Carl Cori in an anatomy class, and the two married in 1920, the year both graduated, after Gerty converted to Catholicism for the wedding. They left for Vienna to research blood disorders in a hungry postwar city, then decided, together, to leave Europe altogether.

Carl sailed for America first; Gerty followed six months later, in 1922, after struggling separately to find work as a woman physician, and both took research posts at a cancer institute in Buffalo, New York, where they published fifty papers together over nine years despite a director who warned it was un-American for a married couple to collaborate and threatened to fire her outright. Working nights and weekends alongside their assigned duties, they mapped how the body burns and rebuilds sugar: the Cori cycle they proposed in 1929 traces lactic acid from working muscle to the liver and back again as usable glucose. They isolated the compound now called the Cori ester and the enzyme phosphorylase, and later showed that specific enzyme defects cause specific inherited diseases, a finding that reshaped how medicine understood genetic disorders more broadly.

Washington University hired Carl as a full professor and department chair in 1931 and hired Gerty as a research associate at one-tenth his salary; the chancellor, Arthur Compton, had to personally waive the school's anti-nepotism rule just to keep her on staff at all. She did not reach a professorship equal to her husband's until 1947, thirteen years after her work qualified her for one, months before Stockholm split half the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine between them, making her the third woman to win a Nobel Prize in any science and the first American woman to win it in medicine. That same year, a mountain-climbing trip surfaced the first signs of myelosclerosis, a fatal bone-marrow disease likely caused by years of unshielded X-ray exposure in her lab. She kept working for ten more years anyway.

Cori died of kidney and bone-marrow failure on October 26, 1957, in St. Louis, at 61, having slowed her research only in its final months. Her son, Tom, inherited both Nobel medals and donated them to Washington University in 2016. The university's old biochemistry laboratory is now a National Historic Chemical Landmark, a lunar crater and a Berkeley supercomputer carry her name, and the National Women's Hall of Fame inducted her in 1998. Six scientists trained in the Coris' own lab later won Nobel Prizes of their own, a multiplier effect that outlasted the university's early reluctance to pay her as what she plainly already was.

Gerty Cori's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Cori cycle discovery
  Described how lactic acid from muscle is recycled by the liver into glucose 1929
• Glucose-1-phosphate (the Cori ester) discovery
  Identified in frog muscle; foundational to their later enzyme work 1936
• Phosphorylase discovery
  Isolated the enzyme governing glycogen breakdown and synthesis 1938
• Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine other
  Shared with Carl Cori and Bernardo Houssay 1947

• August 15, 1896 aged 0 Born in Prague, Austria-Hungary
• 1914 aged ~18 Admitted to the German medical school of Charles-Ferdinand University, Prague
• 1920 aged ~24 Marries Carl Cori and graduates medical school
• 1922 aged ~26 Emigrates to Buffalo, New York
• 1929 aged ~33 Proposes the Cori cycle
• 1931 aged ~35 Joins Washington University in St. Louis as a research associate Hired at one-tenth her husband's salary as full professor.
• 1947 aged ~51 Wins the Nobel Prize and is diagnosed with myelosclerosis
• October 26, 1957 aged 61 Dies in St. Louis

• Harry S. Truman 1884–1972
  33rd President who authorized the atomic bomb and implemented the Marshall Plan. appointed
• Barbara McClintock 1902–1992
  Cytogeneticist who discovered transposable elements and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. preceded as female Nobel laureate
• Chien-Shiung Wu 1912–1997
  Experimental physicist whose decisive work on parity violation transformed particle physics and challenged assumptions about natural symmetry. parallel case in overlooked recognition