Gerty Cori

Origins and early life

Gerty Cori was born Gerty Radnitz into a Jewish family in Prague, then in Austria-Hungary, on 15 August 1896.

Work and career

Her father was a chemist who ran sugar refineries after inventing a method of refining; her mother was a cultivated woman who counted Franz Kafka among her friends. At sixteen she decided to become a doctor and discovered she had none of the prerequisites, so in a single year she covered the equivalent of eight years of Latin and five of physics, chemistry and mathematics, passed the entrance examination and was admitted in 1914 to the medical faculty of the Karl-Ferdinands-Universität — something few women achieved then.

She met Carl Cori in an anatomy class, married him on their graduation in 1920, and in 1922 the couple left a deteriorating Europe for the United States. Working as one laboratory rather than two careers, they traced how the body breaks glycogen down into glucose and builds it back — the cycle that carries their name — and isolated the phosphate intermediate that makes it work. In 1947 she became the first woman awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and the third woman to win a Nobel in science.

President Truman appointed her to the board of the National Science Foundation, a post she held until her death on 26 October 1957. Six scientists who trained in the Coris' laboratory went on to Nobel Prizes of their own, and in 2004 the room they shared was declared a National Historic Landmark. She had converted to Catholicism as a young woman; the directory records her as it records anyone born Jewish.