Gerty Cori

Gerty Cori: A Nobel Prize at One-Tenth the Salary

When Washington University in St. Louis agreed in 1931 to hire both Coris — the only institution that would — it gave Carl a professorship and gave his wife the rank of research associate at one-tenth his pay. She was warned, in so many words, that working with her husband might damage his career. Sixteen years later Gerty Cori collected a Nobel Prize for work she had done alongside him, having become full professor only months before.

Prague, and a Year of Latin

Gerty Theresa Radnitz was born on 15 August 1896 in Prague, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, into a Jewish family of some cultivation. Her father, Otto Radnitz, was a chemist who had invented a successful sugar-refining method and went on to manage refineries; her mother, Martha, moved in literary circles and was a friend of Franz Kafka. Gerty was tutored at home before attending a girls' lyceum — an education that, by design, left her unqualified for anything serious.

At sixteen she decided to study medicine and discovered exactly what that meant: she had no Latin, no physics, no chemistry and no mathematics. Encouraged by an uncle who was a professor of paediatrics, she compressed eight years of Latin, five years of science and five years of mathematics into a single year of study, passed the university entrance examination, and in 1914 was admitted to the medical faculty of the Karl-Ferdinands-Universität in Prague. Women were scarce there, and the achievement was uncommon in the exact sense of the word.

A Partnership Formed in Medical School

Among her classmates was Carl Ferdinand Cori, who was drawn to her charm, vitality, humour and her enthusiasm for mountaineering. Both had entered medical school at eighteen; both graduated in 1920; they married the same year, Gerty converting to Catholicism so the wedding could take place in the Catholic Church. The couple moved to Vienna, where Gerty worked on the paediatrics ward of the Carolinen Children's Hospital, running experiments on temperature regulation and publishing on blood disorders.

Post-war Central Europe was not a place to build a career. Food shortages left Gerty with a vitamin deficiency that damaged her eyes, and antisemitism was rising. Carl emigrated to the United States in 1922; Gerty followed six months later, once she had secured a post of her own. Both joined the New York State Institute for the Study of Malignant Disease in Buffalo — later the Roswell Park Cancer Institute. They were naturalised in 1928.

Buffalo: Nine Years of Being Told to Stop

At Roswell Park the Coris settled on carbohydrate metabolism, the chemistry by which the body stores and releases the sugar that fuels it. The institution disapproved of their collaboration; its director went so far as to threaten Gerty with dismissal if she did not stop working with her husband. She did not stop. Between 1922 and 1931 the pair published fifty papers, eleven of them by Gerty alone.

In 1929 they proposed the theoretical scheme that would eventually take them to Stockholm. The Cori cycle describes how glycogen stored in muscle is broken down to lactic acid, which is then resynthesised and stored again as energy — a closed loop linking muscle and liver that explained how the body sustains exertion. It gave physiology a mechanism where it had previously had only observations.

St. Louis, and the Cori Ester

When the Coris looked to move, several universities offered Carl a position and refused to hire Gerty. One interviewer told them it was "un-American" for a married couple to work together. Carl turned down a post at the University at Buffalo because the institution would not employ his wife. Only Washington University in St. Louis offered both of them jobs, and only after Chancellor Arthur Compton made a special allowance overriding the anti-nepotism rules — at one-tenth of Carl's salary. It took her thirteen years to reach her husband's rank: associate professor of research biological chemistry and pharmacology in 1943, and full professor shortly before the Nobel Prize.

The St. Louis work was the payoff. In frog muscle the Coris found the intermediate compound that makes glycogen breakdown possible — glucose 1-phosphate, universally known since as the Cori ester. They determined its structure, identified phosphorylase, the enzyme that catalyses its formation, and showed that the reaction runs both ways, converting glycogen to glucose and glucose back to glycogen. It was one of the first times a metabolic pathway had been taken apart down to the level of the individual enzyme.

Gerty then turned the chemistry on disease. She identified at least four distinct forms of glycogen storage disease, each traceable to a specific enzyme defect — and in doing so became the first person to demonstrate that a human genetic disease is caused by a faulty enzyme. That single result underwrites the whole modern field of inherited metabolic disorders.

Her colleague Joseph Larner remembered the texture of the work rather than its grandeur: "She was constantly in the laboratory, where we two worked alone. We washed our own laboratory glassware and she would occasionally complain bitterly to Carl about not having any dishwashing help."

Stockholm, 1947

Gerty and Carl Cori shared half of the 1947 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discovery of the course of the catalytic conversion of glycogen." The other half went to the Argentine physiologist Bernardo Houssay for his work on the anterior pituitary hormone in sugar metabolism. Gerty became the third woman to win a Nobel Prize in science — after Marie Curie and Irène Joliot-Curie — and the first woman ever to receive it in Physiology or Medicine.

The honours arrived in a rush afterwards: the Garvan–Olin Medal and the St. Louis Award in 1948, national honorary membership of Iota Sigma Pi in 1949, the Sugar Research Prize in 1950, the Borden Award in 1951, and election as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1953. She was the fourth woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and President Truman appointed her to the board of the National Science Foundation.

Ten Years of Working Anyway

Shortly before the Nobel announcement, on a mountain-climbing trip, Gerty was diagnosed with myelosclerosis, a fatal disease of the bone marrow. Her exposure to X-rays during the Buffalo years may have contributed to it. She kept working in the laboratory for a decade, easing off only in her final months, and died at home on 26 October 1957, aged sixty-one. She was cremated and her ashes scattered; her son later raised a cenotaph for both parents at Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis.

Six Nobel laureates were trained in the Coris' laboratory, a mentoring record surpassed only by J. J. Thomson. The 25-foot-square room in which most of it happened was designated a National Historic Landmark by the American Chemical Society in 2004. Gerty Cori was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1998; craters on the Moon and on Venus carry her name, as does a Berkeley Lab supercomputer commissioned in 2015. Her son Tom donated both parents' Nobel medals to Washington University's School of Medicine in 2016, where they are displayed together — identical objects awarded to two scientists who had never been paid the same.