Gerty Cori

Gerty Theresa Radnitz was born on August 15, 1896, in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She was the eldest of three daughters in a Jewish family; her father, Otto Radnitz, managed sugar refineries, and her mother, Martha, was a cultured woman with connections to Prague's intellectual circles ^[1]. Educated at home until the age of ten, Gerty then attended a lyceum for girls, a school that prepared young women for social life rather than for university study ^[2].

An uncle who taught pediatrics encouraged her ambition to study medicine, but the gap between her schooling and the university entrance requirements was enormous. In roughly two years she taught herself the Latin, mathematics, physics, and chemistry that a full gymnasium course would normally have covered, passing the entrance examination in 1914 ^[1]. That same year she enrolled at the medical school of the German branch of Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague.

During her first semesters she met a fellow student, Carl Ferdinand Cori, in an anatomy class. The two shared a love of laboratory work and the outdoors, and they published their first joint research paper while still students ^[2]. Both received their medical doctorates in 1920.

The couple married in Vienna in August 1920, shortly after graduation, and Gerty converted to Catholicism, Carl's faith ^[1]. Postwar Vienna was a difficult place to begin a scientific career. Gerty took a position at the Karolinen Children's Hospital, where she worked on thyroid disorders and temperature regulation, while food shortages were severe enough that she developed symptoms linked to malnutrition ^[3]. Rising antisemitism in Austria also threatened Carl's prospects because of his marriage to a Jewish-born woman, and the pair resolved to leave Europe ^[2].

In 1922 Carl accepted a post at the New York State Institute for the Study of Malignant Diseases, later known as Roswell Park, in Buffalo, New York. Gerty followed six months afterward, taking a position as an assistant pathologist, and the two became naturalized citizens of the United States in 1928 ^[1]. At Roswell Park the director discouraged their collaboration, at one point warning Gerty that she was harming her husband's career by working with him. They collaborated anyway, publishing dozens of papers on how the body handles carbohydrates ^[3].

It was in Buffalo that the Coris mapped the metabolic loop that carries their name. They showed that glycogen in muscle is broken down to lactic acid during exertion, that the lactic acid travels through the blood to the liver, and that the liver rebuilds it into glucose and glycogen, which can return to the muscle. They described this circuit, now called the Cori cycle, in 1929 ^[4].

Anyone asking who was Gerty Cori will find the answer in a handful of discoveries that reshaped biochemistry. In 1931 the Coris moved to Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, where Carl became a professor of pharmacology. Gerty, despite an identical degree and an equal share of the published work, was hired only as a research associate at a small fraction of her husband's salary, a rank she held for sixteen years ^[3].

The St. Louis years were extraordinarily productive. In 1936 the Coris isolated a new compound, glucose 1-phosphate, from minced frog muscle. The substance became known as the Cori ester, and it proved to be the crucial intermediate through which glycogen is broken apart ^[4]. They then identified and purified the enzyme responsible, glycogen phosphorylase, and by 1939 they had achieved something remarkable: the synthesis of glycogen in a test tube, the first time a large biological molecule had been assembled outside a living cell using purified enzymes ^[5]. Gerty Cori's achievements in enzyme chemistry, particularly her studies of how phosphorylase switches between active and inactive forms, opened questions about enzyme regulation that occupied biochemists for decades.

Recognition arrived in 1947. That year Gerty was finally promoted to full professor of biological chemistry, and months later she and Carl shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with the Argentine physiologist Bernardo Houssay, cited for their discovery of the course of the catalytic conversion of glycogen ^[6]. She was the third woman ever to receive a Nobel Prize in a science category, after Marie Curie and Irène Joliot-Curie, and the first American woman to do so ^[1]. In 1948 she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, one of the very few women then admitted, and President Harry Truman later appointed her to the board of the National Science Foundation ^[3].

The Cori partnership was one of the most celebrated collaborations in the history of science. Colleagues described the two as complementary: Carl reflective and inclined to step back and survey a problem, Gerty quick, intense, and demanding of experimental rigor ^[3]. Their laboratory at Washington University became a magnet for talent. Several researchers who trained there, including Arthur Kornberg, Severo Ochoa, Luis Leloir, Christian de Duve, and Earl Sutherland, went on to win Nobel Prizes of their own ^[5].

Outside the laboratory Gerty read widely in history and literature, gardened, and shared with Carl a lifelong enthusiasm for mountaineering that dated from their student holidays in the Austrian Alps ^[1]. The couple had one child, a son named Tom, born in 1936. Friends recalled that Gerty returned to the bench within days of his birth, unwilling to let motherhood interrupt experiments that were approaching a decisive stage ^[2].

Her persistence in the face of open discrimination is a recurring theme in accounts of her life. Universities that recruited Carl repeatedly refused to hire Gerty, citing rules against employing spouses or simply their unwillingness to appoint a woman. Carl declined offers from several institutions because they would not give his wife a genuine position ^[3].

In the summer of 1947, while the couple was climbing near Snowmass in Colorado, Gerty fell ill. She was diagnosed with myelosclerosis, a rare and ultimately fatal disease of the bone marrow in which fibrous tissue crowds out the blood-forming cells ^[1]. The diagnosis came just months before the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm, which she attended in December of that year.

Rather than retreat, she redirected her research and produced some of her most original science while seriously ill. Turning to inherited disorders in which children accumulate abnormal quantities of glycogen, she showed in 1952 and 1953 that these conditions arose from defects in specific enzymes. She demonstrated that one form, now called von Gierke disease, resulted from a deficiency of glucose 6-phosphatase, and she identified another form caused by an abnormally structured glycogen and a missing debranching enzyme, a condition still known as Cori disease ^[5]. This work provided some of the first proof that a human disease could be traced to the absence of a single enzyme, a founding insight of modern biochemical genetics ^[4].

Through a decade of transfusions and declining strength she continued to run experiments, review manuscripts, and mentor students. Gerty Cori died on October 26, 1957, at her home in Glendale, Missouri, at the age of 61 ^[6].

The essentials of any Gerty Cori biography read like a chapter of twentieth century biochemistry itself: the Cori cycle, the Cori ester, test tube synthesis of glycogen, and the enzymatic explanation of glycogen storage diseases. The cycle she and Carl described remains standard teaching in physiology and features in every account of how muscles manage energy during exercise ^[4]. Her disease classification survives too; physicians still label glycogen storage disorders with a numbering scheme that grew from her work, and type III carries her name ^[5].

Honors accumulated after her death. Craters on the Moon and on Venus were named Cori in her memory, and in 2008 the United States Postal Service issued a stamp bearing her portrait in a series honoring American scientists ^[2]. In 2004 the American Chemical Society designated the Cori laboratory work on carbohydrate metabolism a National Historic Chemical Landmark, recognizing research conducted at Washington University in St. Louis ^[4].

Among the most cited Gerty Cori facts is her place in a long struggle for the recognition of women in science. She spent most of her career underpaid and under-titled, becoming a full professor only in the year she won the Nobel Prize ^[3]. Later generations of biochemists, including many women, have pointed to her as evidence of what institutions lost by excluding half of the available talent, and of what one determined researcher accomplished despite them.