Carl and Gerty Cori: a Nobel Prizewinning husband and wife team

Today I bring you the story of Carl and Gerty Cori – particularly Gerty, one of many notable 20th-century female scientists who were poorly treated in their profession (American Chemical Society Commemorative Booklet 2004).
Carl and Gerty were husband and wife and scientific collaborators who greatly advanced knowledge of how the body produces and stores energy. They shared the 1947 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for this work.
Carl Corey and Gerty Radnitz were born in 1896 in Prague. Carl’s family was Catholic and his father was director of the Marine Biological Station in Trieste. The young Carl developed a love of science and mountaineering. Gerty’s family was Jewish and her father was a chemist. Her mother was a friend of famous novelist Franz Kafka.
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Carl met Gerty in 1914 at Prague’s Carl Ferdinand University where both studied medicine, including biochemistry, physiology and pharmacology. Carl was attracted by Gerty’s charm, intelligence and love of outdoor pursuits. They studied together, and went on country excursions and skiing expeditions. Carl and Gerty graduated in medicine in 1920, published their first joint research paper and were married in Vienna where they pursued postdoctoral studies.
Life was difficult and Gerty found it hard to obtain employment because she was both Jewish and female. Carl took a position at the University of Graz in pharmacology where he became interested in the absorption and metabolism of sugars in animals. Gerty’s father was a diabetic and it is said he asked his daughter to find him a cure.
The Coris were unhappy in Graz because of poor living conditions and anti-Jewish sentiment. They investigated emigration to America, without success at first. But eventually Carl accepted a job offer from the State Institute for the Study of Malignant Disease in Buffalo, New York, and six months later, in 1922, Gerty joined him as assistant pathologist. This began a professional collaboration that lasted the rest of their lives.
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There was initial opposition at the institute to the Coris working together. But colleagues soon came around to respecting their wishes. Carl became chairman of the pharmacology department at Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, in 1930, and Gerty took up a research position in that department on a token salary of 10 per cent of Carl’s salary even though she equally partnered Carl in the laboratory.
On another occasion, Carl was offered a position at a prestigious university on condition that he stopped collaborating with Gerty, who was told it was “unAmerican” for a husband and wife to work together.
The Coris had a very fruitful collaborative research relationship. A colleague at their Washington University laboratory said: “They were a remarkable pair. Gerty would have flights of fancy. She’d come up with extraordinary ideas. Carl had the ability to put them into concrete questions to answer. And therefore as a team they were extraordinary.”
The Coris were awarded their Nobel Prize for elucidating essential details on how the body metabolises glucose. Glucose supplies the energy that powers the body’s activities, eg glucose must be “burned” to power muscle movement. The body stores glucose in muscle and liver as glycogen, a polymer of glucose, which is processed into glucose as needed. The Coris discovered details of the interplay between glycogen and glucose – the “Cori Cycle”.
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They demonstrated that the hormone insulin increases the conversion of glucose to glycogen in muscle and liver. The hormones adrenaline and epinephrine work in reverse, stimulating conversion of glycogen to glucose. It was known that muscle glycogen doesn’t contribute significantly to blood glucose so the Coris concluded that muscle glycogen is converted into an intermediate substance that leaves the muscle and is carried to the liver by the blood where it is reconverted into glucose and returned to muscle via the blood.
The intermediate substance is lactic acid that accumulates in muscle during heavy exercise. The muscle is unable to “burn” lactic acid. They described this Cori Cycle in 1929.
In 1947 the Coris discovered that Gerty had myelosclerosis, a fatal disease that leads to anaemia. Carl later wrote that “she bore [the disease] with great fortitude and without let-up in her scientific interests”. She died at home in 1957. Carl remarried in 1960 and died in 1984.
William Reville is an emeritus professor of biochemistry at UCC