Gerty Cori

Gerty Theresa Cori was born on August 15, 1896, in Prague, which was then part of Austria-Hungary and is now in the Czech Republic. She grew up in an educated family and received a strong early education, though girls at the time were not always encouraged to pursue careers in science or medicine. Cori was determined and academically gifted, and she eventually entered a field where very few women were able to build scientific careers.

She studied medicine at the German University of Prague, where she met fellow medical student Carl Cori, who would later become her research partner and husband. After the couple married, they moved to the United States in search of better opportunities for scientific work. However, even after immigrating, Gerty Cori faced discrimination because she was both a woman and a scientist working alongside her husband. At several institutions, she was offered lower-ranking jobs or lower pay despite doing work equal in importance to his.

Coris eventually worked at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where Gerty Cori made her most important contributions to biochemistry. Her research focused on how the human body stores and uses energy. Together with Carl Cori, she studied the way glycogen, a stored form of glucose, is broken down and converted back into energy for the body. Their work led to the discovery of the Cori cycle, a process that explains how muscles convert glycogen into lactic acid during activity and how the liver helps turn it back into glucose. This was a major breakthrough in understanding metabolism.

Cori’s research transformed the scientific understanding of diabetes, hormonal regulation, and inherited metabolic diseases. In 1947, she became the first woman in the United States to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. This was an extraordinary achievement, especially given the barriers she had faced throughout her career.

Even after winning the Nobel Prize, Cori continued her research while dealing with serious illness. She died on October 26, 1957, in St. Louis, Missouri, at the age of 61. Today, Gerty Cori is remembered as a pioneering biochemist whose work helped explain how the body manages energy and whose success opened doors for women in medical science.