- Person
- Gerty Cori
- Lived
- 1896–1957
- Field
- Biochemistry
- From
- Czech-American
The story
Gerty Radnitz was born in 1896 into a Jewish family in Prague and studied medicine at the German University there, where she met her husband and lifelong collaborator, Carl Cori. Rising antisemitism in postwar Europe helped drive the couple to the United States in 1922, where they worked at a cancer institute in Buffalo, New York. Their question was a basic one for medicine: what controls the amount of sugar in the blood?
Using precise new methods for measuring glucose, glycogen, lactic acid and phosphates, the Coris traced sugar’s journey around the body in experiments on rats. When muscles work, they break down glycogen, their store of linked glucose molecules, and release lactic acid into the blood. The liver takes up the lactic acid and turns it back into glucose, which returns through the blood to the muscles. In 1929 they described this loop, now called the Cori cycle, and showed how the hormones insulin and adrenaline shift sugar between muscle and liver.
In 1931 the Coris moved to Washington University in St. Louis, where Gerty, despite her achievements, was given a research associate’s post at a fraction of her husband’s salary. In 1936 they discovered a new compound, glucose-1-phosphate, now called the Cori ester, which is the first product when glycogen is broken down. They identified the enzyme that makes it, phosphorylase, and used it to build glycogen in a test tube, the first time a large biological molecule had been made outside a living cell.
In 1947 Gerty and Carl Cori shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Bernardo Houssay. Gerty was the first woman to win the prize in medicine. Their work clarified the chemistry of how the body stores and releases energy from carbohydrates, knowledge that, in the words of the U.S. Postal Service stamp issued in her honour in 2008, contributed to the understanding and treatment of diabetes and other metabolic diseases.
Why it matters
The Cori cycle and the Coris’ enzyme discoveries are basic to how doctors understand blood sugar, exercise and fasting, diabetes and other metabolic diseases.
About Gerty Cori
Prague-born biochemist who mapped how the body stores and burns sugar, the Cori cycle, and first proved a missing enzyme can cause disease. First woman to win the Nobel Prize in medicine.
More about Gerty Cori
Sources
- Gerty Theresa Cori Jewish Women’s Archive
- Gerty Cori, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Gerty Cori Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.