Women Scientists

Gerty Cori 1896-1957

At a glance:

Nobel prize winning American who discovered how energy is stored in the body

Shamefully Gerty Cori was only made a full professor a year before she won the Nobel for Physiology or Medicine in 1947, a prize she shared jointly with her husband Carl. The couple, originally from the Czech Republic, worked at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in New York where their main research focus was energy metabolism in the body. They published some 50 papers jointly, describing the movement of energy in the body from muscle to the liver and back to muscle again, giving their name to the process - the Cori cycle. Gerty also published 11 articles as a single author. When they left Roswell in 1930, several universities offered Carl a job, but none would hire Gerty. She was told that she would ruin his career if she continued to attempt to work with him. In 1931, he was given a chair at Washington University who grudgingly offered Gerty a lowly research assistant's post, finally giving her a chair fifteen years later in 1946.
Gerty Cori

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