Gerty Theresa Cori

15 August 1896, Prague – 26 October 1957, St. Louis (Missouri, USA)

Gerty Theresa Cori was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Prague. Her father Otto Radnitz was a chemist and director of a sugar factory. She studied at the Faculty of Medicine at the German university in Prague, graduating in 1920. She became primarily interested in chemistry while still a student. After her graduation ceremony, she and her husband Carl Cori, a former classmate, moved to Vienna. Due to their difficult financial situation, her husband accepted the position of a researcher at the State Institute for the Study of Malignant Diseases in Buffalo, USA. She herself began working in the pathology department of the same institute, and later in the biochemistry department as a researcher. In 1931, they moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where she worked at Washington University School of Medicine. First she taught pharmacology and in 1947 she became a professor of biochemistry. She was recognised as an excellent experimenter with an ability for deep and accurate analysis. In 1936, the two scientists discovered the process of the catalytic conversion of glycogen, later named the Cori cycle. In 1950, she also discovered the basis of diseases caused by glycogen deficiency. Together with her husband, she also did research in metabolism and 1947 Carl and Gerty Theresa Cori were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (together with Bernardo Houssay) for the discovery of the function of hormones of the anterior lobe of hypophysis in the metabolism of sugars. Gerty Theresa Cori thus became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and the third woman in the world to win the Nobel Prize in exact sciences (after Marie Skłodowska Curie and Irène Curie). In spite of a chronic disease, she worked at Washington University until her death. She died in 1957. Carl and Gerty Cori share a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.

Unfortunately, the communist regime let Carl and Gerty Cori be forgotten, both in their hometown and in Czechoslovakia. It was not until 2000 that commemorative plaques were placed on the houses where they were born: for Gerty Theresa Cori in Petrská and for Carl Cori in Salmovská Street. Their son Carl Thomas Cori, named after his father and president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, was present on the occasion. In 2018, both of the Nobel Prizes (together with the Nobel Prize awarded to Jaroslav Heyrovský and Tomáš Halík’s Templeton Prize) were exhibited at the “100 Years – 100 Objects – 100 Stories” exhibition organised by Charles University on the occasion of the 100^th anniversary of the foundation of Czechoslovakia.