by Josh Forman, Head of Science, Education & Outreach and Gidon Schwartz, Education & Outreach Executive
Gertrude Theresa Radnitz was born in Prague in 1896, into a family with a rich tapestry of science and society. Her father was a chemist, who invented a new way to refine sugar, and her mother was a socialite, listing Franz Kafka amongst her social crowd. This upbringing clearly had an immense impact on Gerty who strived to follow the path that she wanted to, and not be curtailed by the opinions of others and the inbuilt misogyny, prejudice and limits placed on women in the scientific world.
Gerty was tutored at home during her early years before going to a lyceum for girls at age 16. She had a close relationship with her uncle, who was a professor of paediatrics, and he inspired her to study medicine at university. However, she realised that she did not have the prerequisite qualifications and was able to study the 8 years of Latin, 5 years’ worth of science and 5 years of mathematics in the space of just a year, whilst also preparing for the university entrance exams. Amazingly, she was admitted to medical school in Prague at a time where it was frowned upon for women to enter.
Gerty started medical school in 1914, aged 18 and met Carl Cori, another medical student. Upon their graduation in 1920 they married after Gerty converted from Judaism to Catholicism, to marry in a church. Carl had been conscripted to the Austrian army in World War I, and the war had lasting health implications for both Carl and Gerty.
After two years of practising medicine in Vienna, the deteriorating state of life in Vienna, as well as rising antisemitism, prompted the Coris to emigrate to America in 1922. Carl was able to secure a position at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York. However, the institute was reluctant to hire Gerty, and so she had to stay in Vienna six months longer than Carl, until he convinced them to offer her a position as well, but with a fraction of the pay.
This prejudice towards Gerty as a woman persisted throughout much of her career. Gerty and Carl worked collaboratively for decades, publishing over 50 papers together and winning the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, but Gerty was threatened with dismissal by the director of the institute if she continued to work with Carl.
Gerty and Carl ignored the threats and continued to work together, and in 1929 published their work on a theoretical biochemical cycle which described how the body breaks down carbohydrates to lactic acid in the muscle. This is now known as the Cori cycle, and the Coris won the 1947 Nobel Prize for this alongside Bernardo Houssay. This made Gerty just the third woman to win a Nobel Prize, all three receiving the prize alongside their husbands. Gerty was in fact the first woman to win the award in Physiology, and first woman outside the Curie family to win a Nobel.
In 1931, Gerty and Carl left Roswell. Carl turned down offers from several universities because while he was offered many positions, they all refused to hire Gerty, being told during one interview that it was considered ‘un-American’ for a married couple to work together. Eventually, the Coris moved to St Louis, Missouri when Washington University (WashU) offered positions to both Gerty and Carl. However, despite her significant research experience, Gerty was only offered the position of research assistant at a wage 1/10th that of her husband’s, with the warning that her presence would impede her husband’s career. The Chancellor of WashU made a special allowance for Gerty, ignoring the university’s nepotism rules.
It took Gerty 13 years to achieve the same rank as her husband, despite collaborating equally on the research. Gerty was made an associate professor in 1943, and then a full professor in 1947, just before being awarded the Nobel Prize.
Gerty also went on to identify glucose 1-phospahte (known as the Cori ester), which is essential for aerobic respiration, and was the first person to show that a defect in an enzyme can cause a human genetic disease through her work on glycogen storage disease – a number of which are on Jnetics’ recessive screening panel.
Gerty was appointed to several national boards, notably being appointed by President Harry Truman as a board member of the National Science Foundation, and the 4th woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences. A major accolade is that six scientists that Gerty and Carl mentored went on to win Nobel Prizes, only surpassed by the number mentored by British physicist, JJ Thompson. Gerty was also honoured by a US postal stamp in 2008 (although there was a printing error in the formula of glucose 1-phosphate). She has craters named after her on the Moon and Venus. Her lab in St Louis is now deemed a National Historic Landmark by the American Chemical Society.
Gerty Cori continued her research at WashU in St Louis until her untimely death in 1957. She passed away after a 10 year battle with myelosclerosis, a fatal bone marrow disease.
