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SECOND
GENERATION
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5
Gel Row Cori
August 15, 1896 - October 26, 1957
BIOCHEMIST
Nolbel Prize in Chesnistry 1947
G]3RTY CORPS HUSBAND was offered the job of his dreams at
am Americam university—provided he stop working with his wife.
When he refused, his would-be employers were appalled. Taking
Gerty aside, they gravely informed her that she was ruining her
husband's career. Stelnly, they lectured the Czech-bom woman, "It
is un-Americam for a maul to work with his wife."
In private later, Gerty burst into tears. Her husband Carl reas-
sured her. Collaborating with one's wife in the 1920s was not un-
Americam, he said. "It is merely unusual."
The University of Rochester passed up a good opportunity
when it turned Gerty Cori away: she became the first American
woman to win a Nobel Prize in science. Only Marie Curie and her
daughter IreneJoliot-Curie had won science Nobels before her.
For thirty-five years, Gerty and Carl Cori formed such a close
scientific partnership that it was hard to tell who had contributed
what. The Coris conferred with each other constandy. When one
started a sentence, the other finished it. Listening to them talk,
friends had the impression that two voices were expressing their
ideas from one brain.
Together, the Coris laid the foundation for our understanding of
how cells use food and convert it to energy. The Cori cycle has be-
come such a basic part of high school science that it is easy to forget
how revolutionary it was during the 1920s. For the first time, it was
possible to show how muscles use sugar for quick energy and how
the muscles and liver store excess energy until it is needed.
Their other discoveries were even more important. At the time,
lithe was known about enzymes, the proteins that enable cells to
filUCtiOII, grow, and reproduce. Nevertheless, the Coris were able to
93
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94 NOBEL PRIZE WOMEN IN SCIENCE
identify and isolate the enzymes in charge of converting sugar from
the form that muscles use for energy to another form, which the
body uses for storing energy. They were pioneers in the study of
both enzymes amd hommones, and their work had major implications
for the understanding of diabetes. Gerty Cori begam the study of in-
herited disorders with her studies of diseases caused by enzyme defi-
ciencies. Their work ultimately proved to scientists and physicians
alike that an understanding of basic chemical processes is important
to biology and medicine.
Their influence continues to this day: They trained a generation
of leading biological scientists; their lab produced eight Nobel Prize
winners, including Carl and Gerty Cori.
Gerty Cori rarely discussed her early life. She was both Gerty
Theresa Radnitz to a moderately wealthyJewish family on August
15, 1896, in Prague, Czechoslovakia, then part of the Austro-Hun-
gariam empire. Her father, Otto Radnitz, was a chemist and business-
man who managed several beet-sugar refineries. The eldest of three
daughters, Gerty was privately tutored at home until she was ten
years old. Then she was sent to a girls' finishing school to learn so-
cial graces and a smattering of culture, enough to converse pleasantly
with a husband and his friends. It was Gerty's umcle, a pediatrics
professor, who encouraged her to attend medical school. Officially,
women were allowed to attend Carl Ferdinand University in Prague,
but in practice, most could not. Girls' schools at the time did not
teach Latm, mathematics, physics, or chemistry, all of which were
required subjects for entry to the university. Before Gerty could en-
ter medical school, she would have to lean eight years of Latin and
five years of mathematics, physics, and chemistry.
Vacationing with her family in the Tyrol the summer of her
sixteenth birthday, she met a high school teacher who offered to get
her started in Latin. By the end of the summer, she had mastered
three years' worth of Latin. By the end of the following year, she was
ready to take the university entrance test: "the hardest examination
I was ever called upon to take," she said. Europeans interested in
biomedical research attended medical school. So when Gerty passed
the entrance exam, she enrolled in the medical school at the Germam
branch of the university in Prague. The university also had a
Czech-language branch. The year was 1914, and she was eighteen
years old.
Gerty met the two loves of her life—biochemistry and Carl
Cori—during her first year in medical school. From the moment she
caught a glimpse of biochemistry, she was fascinated. Science was
one human endeavor that promised to help mankind, and bio-
chemistry was am exciting new science that applied the principles of
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Gerry Radnitz Ctr.
95
Gerty Cori.
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96 NOBEL PRIZE WOMEN IN SCIENCE
Gert,v and Carl Cori, 1947.
Nobel Prize winners at Washington University (seated, from left) Carl
Cori;Joseph Erlanger; Gert,v Cori; and Arthur H. Compton, chancellor
of Washington University, 1952.
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Gerry Radnitz Cori
97
Gerty and Carl Cori in her lab, 1948.
chemistry to biological problems. She met Carl Cori in anatomy
class. Carl was tall and handsome, fair-haired and blue-eyed. Gerty
was pretty with reddish-brown hair and brown eyes. While Carl was
shy, she was vivacious, exceedingly quick, and brilliantly intelligent.
In public, she seemed to overshadow Carl because he was slower at
digesting material and she was more aggressive. Gerty's Jewish
background did not bother Carl. Raised in the polyglot Adriatric
port city of Trieste, where his father directed a marine biological
station Carl was immune to the anti-Semitism so prevalent in East-
ern Europe.
Carl was smitten. He thought Gerty was "a young woman who
had charm, vitality, intelligence, a sense of humor, and love of the
outdoors." Gerty, who derived a deep sense of satisfaction from
imposing order on a chaos of data, dreamed of becoming a research
scientist. Together, they studied their way through medical school,
spending their vacations mountain clirnbmg and skung, until Carl
was drafted into the sanitation corps of the Austrian army during
World War I.
When Carl returned from the war, he resumed medical school
and courtship Cori-style. He and Gerty collaborated on a research
project Evolving a component of blood and published their first joint
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98 NOBEL PRIZE WOMEN IN SCIENCE
paper. After their graduation from medical school, Gerty converted
to Catholicism so that she and Carl could be married in a Roman
Catholic church; the Cori family opposed their marriage because
they thought that Gerty's Jewish ancestry would cripple Carl's ca-
reer.
By the time of their marriage in 1920, Eastern Europe was in
shambles. Starvation amd semistarvation were rampant. The victori-
ous allies had dismamded Austria-Humgary, and borders and popula-
tions were shifting back and forth. One night Carl and his friends
dressed as laborers and secredy dismamded a research institute to
move it from Czechoslovakia to Humgary, because its foumder was
Humgariam. In the newly established nation of Czechoslovakia, basic
research was a low priority and physicians were needed more than
researchers. Even in Vienna itself, research opportunities were slim.
Thanks to a case of frogs sent by his father, Carl was the only doctor
able to conduct any research at the university.
For most of 1921, Gerty and Carl had to live in different cities.
Gerty had a job at the Karolinen Children's Hospital in Vienna,
where she studied and published several papers on cretinism now
called congenital thyroid deficiency.
As pay for her work, she was given her dinners. The hospital's
physicians had voted against accepting a free dietary supplement for
the children, however, because it was provided by American relief
organizations. As a result of the poor food, Gerty developed
xeropUthalmia, now known to be caused by vitamin A deficiency.
Fortunately, a visit to her parents' home in Prague, where the diet
was more nutritious, cured her.
At the University of Graz, Carl had to prove that he was not
Jewish in order to get a job. Aware that anti-Semitism was on the
upswing, Carl became convinced that Europe would soon be fight-
ing mother war.
The Coris sought comfort in long weekend walks together in
the countryside and in visits to Vienna's magnificent art museums.
"Art and science are the glories of the human mind," Gerty declared
late in life. "I see no conflict between them. In the past, they have
flourished together during the great and happy periods of history....
Contemplation of the great human achievements through the ages is
helpful to me in moments of despair and doubt. Humam meanness
and folly then seem less important."
Eventually, the Coris decided Flat they had to leave Europe at
any cost. Desperately, they applied to the Dutch government to work
for five years among the native population of Java. While they
waited to hear about the job, the director of a cancer center in Buf-
falo, New York, interviewed Carl for a position. The New York State
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Gerry Radnitz Cori
99
Institute for the Study of Malignant Diseases operated a hospital
where cancer patients were treated with X rays and radium radia-
tion. The institution later became a distinguished research center,
now known as Roswell Park Memorial Institute. At the time, the di-
rector wanted a Gemman-trained biochemist to run the laboratory
because Gemman chemistry was the best in the world. But Americam
opinion after World War I was so vehemendy amti-Gemman that the
director decided to compromise by hiring an Austrian.
Carl's professor recommended him highly, and Carl got the job
for three thousand dollars a year. He sailed steerage for Buffalo in
1922, leaving Gerty behind at her Viennese job for six more months.
Only after Carl had secured a position for her as an assistant pa-
thologist at the institute did she join him. The Coris were twenty-
five years old when they arrived in Buffalo. During their nine years
there, they established their scientific reputations and became Ameri-
can atlzen S.
"The high state of development of biochemical methods m the
United States came as a revelation," she recalled. Since their labora-
tory duties were minimal and supervision was slight, both Coris
were free to pursue and publish their own research. During her first
two years in Buffalo, Gerty studied the effects of X rays on the skin
and on the metabolism of body organs.
Research in Buffalo involved a certain amount of skullduggery.
When a new director of the institute put his name on their manu-
scripts without even reading or trying to understand them, the Coris
secretly removed his name and submitted the articles to journals un-
der their own. The new director believed that parasites caused can-
cer, and each month he assembled his staff to admonish them,
"Gendemen, it behooves us to find the cause or cure of cancer—and
it's got to be intravenous." Gerty refused to humor him. She pro-
tested indignantly that she could find no parasites in the stools of the
hospital's patients. Angrily, the director warned her that she would
be fired if she did not stay in her own laboratory and quit working
with Carl. She obeyed for a while. But soon, when no one was
watching, she brought out her microscope and begam studying her
own research slides again. After waiting out the stomm, the Coris re-
sumed work together. They were determined to collaborate.
Both Gerty and Carl had become interested in how the body
sends energy from one place to another. It is difficult today to realize
how lithe was known at the time about the body's ability to main-
tain a constant supply of energy between meals and bouts of exer-
cise. A French physiologist had discovered in the nineteenth century
that both the liver and the muscles contain a starchlike substance
Blat he called glycogen: the "sugar maker." But he did not know Blat
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100 NOBEL PRIZE WOMEN IN SCIENCE
each molecule of glycogen consists of hundreds of glucose sugar
molecules chemically bonded together. When the body needs en-
ergy, it breaks apart the glycogen molecule to make the sugar mob
ecules available for immediate energy.
Throughout the 1920s, the Coris carefully measured minute
amounts of sugar, glycogen, and two controlling hormones m labo-
ratory animals. The precision and accuracy of their measurements
became the hallmark of their work. And it was Gerty who was
"undoubtedly primarily responsible for the development of the quam-
titative analytical methodology," wrote Gerty Cori's biographer,
Joseph Larner of the University of Virginia.
By 1929, after six years of intensive work, the Coris could ex-
plain in general terms how mammals get their energy for heavy mus-
cular exercise. They spent the rest of their careers filling in the
details. According to their theory, energy moves in a cycle from
muscle to the liver and back again to muscle. When a runner starts
to sprint, for example, glycogen in the muscles is converted to sugar,
specifically glucose. The muscles extract most of the energy from the
sugar, but leave some in the form of lactic acid. To conserve its re-
sources, the body recycles the lactic acid back into glycogen in a se-
ries of elaborate steps. First, it is sent from the muscle to the liver.
Next, the athlete pants heavily to supply the body with oxygen so
Flat the liver cam convert the lactic acid back into sugar. The sugar
then returns to the muscle, where it is converted back into glycogen
for storage. The Coris called their theory "the cycle of carboLy-
drates." Everyone else called it "the Cori cycle."
The Cori cycle had a profound effect on the treatment of diabe-
tes. Insulin had been discovered in 1921, but lithe was known about
how the human body uses it or sugar. Thanks to the Cori cycle, phy-
sicians had some sense of how healthy bodies maintain a balance
Fig 5.1. The Cori cycle.
The Coris explained how the energy of a heavily exercising
mammal moves Eom the muscle to the liver and back to
muscle.
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Gerry Radnitz Cori
101
between exercise, food, and blood sugar. The Coris' popular fame
rests on their cycle. Among biochemists, however, they are also re-
vered for their later studies of the specific enzymes that operate the
cycle, the hormones that affect it, and the hereditary diseases that
can result from the absence of or damage to the enzymes.
The Buffalo years were enormously prolific. Gerty and Carl
Cori wrote fifty papers together there. Carl's name was listed first
on some, Gerty's name was first on others, depending on who had
done most of the research for that particular article. In addition,
Gerty published eleven articles on her own, and Carl was the author
of another thirty.
The Coris became a smooth-working team in Buffalo. As Carl
discovered, working with an independent women like Gerty was "a
delicate operation which requires much give and take on both sides
and occasionally leads to friction, if both are equal partners and not
willing to yield on a given point." After the first year, they adjusted
to each other. They became an affectionate team. Neither competed
with the other, and each trusted the other's work. When a colleague
said enthusiastically, "Wasn't that a wonderful seminar Gerty gave,"
Carl shrugged and replied, "Well, of course."
The talents of one complemented the skills of the other. "Carl
was not the lab genius," observed William Daughaday of Washing-
ton University School of Medicine, who worked in the Cori lab.
"Carl was the visionary. Gerty was the lab genius, omnivorous in
her interests, gobbling up new issues. They discussed everything to-
gether. Gerty read enormously widely and deeply. She was his initial
processor, and he got many of his ideas from her outreach." The role
she played is a critical one in biology, where no fact exists in com-
plete isolation and seemingly unrelated clues from other fields may
be important. Gerty's reading also suggested new methods and new
approaches to problems. As for Carl, Daughaday said, "he set the
information into concepts."
As a team, the Coris were stronger than either would have been
singly. Both were ambitious, but Gerty had motivation enough for
both. She was tense, while Carl was more relaxed; without her he
would not have worked quite as hard or accomplished as much.
With Carl's contemplative talents and Gerty's instinct for ferreting
out information in the laboratory, they made one discovery after
another.
At home, for entertainment, they read voraciously. In the
evening, they enjoyed reading American literature aloud. Carl pre-
ferred archaeology, poetry, and art. Gerty read biographies and his-
tory. They both loved the out-of-doors. They swam in Lake Erie and
toured the Adirondacks and the White Mountains. They enjoyed
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106 NOBEL PRIZE WOMEN IN SCIENCE
Soon after, the Coris discovered phosphorylase, the enzyme that
breaks glycogen down into the Cori ester. Phosphorylase tears apart
the bonds that hold glycogen's hundreds of sugar molecules to-
gether. The Coris' discovery of phosphorylase marked the first time
that carbohydrate metabolism was studied at the molecular level In
1942, an expert protein chemist, Arda Green, crystallized phospho-
rylase in the Coris' laboratory so that they had ample to study.
In 1939, the Coris thlilled the biology world when they made
glycogen in a test tube. During a lecture at am international confer-
ence in Toronto, Carl Cori picked up a test tube, mixed phosphory-
lase with the Cori ester and some other compounds, incubated the
mixture at room temperature for ten minutes, and then tested it to
prove that it had turned to a starchlike material. Then he passed the
test tube around the audience for everyone to see. Forty years later,
at am anniversary conference held in the same Toronto hotel, speak-
ers were stiD talking about Carl Cori's drama. Physiologists had
been told for years that large molecules could only be made within
living ceDs. Yet the Coris had executed the first bioengineering of a
large biological molecule in a test tube. As Carl Cori noted with un-
derstatement, "A most exciting period of biochemistry began to un-
fold.... Nothing comparable to this period happened until [the
1960s] when it became possible to explore the genetic apparatus of
the ceD."
Twentieth-century medical science was "a succession of hunt-
ers," as the Nobel Prize-winning enzymologist Arthur Kornberg
observed. Early in the twentieth century, the humters searched for
microbes and vitamins. During the middle of the century, enzyme
hunters laid the foundation for today's studies of genes and nerve
ceDs. The Coris were leaders in the enzyme hunt.
Gerty and Carl discovered one enzyme after another, revealing
the conversion of glycogen to sugar and back as a multi-step process
involving a variety of complicated enzymes. By now, they were
studying purified enzymes, biochemicals totaDy isolated from living
ceDs and animals. They were exploring the relationship between the
structure and the function of molecules and how enzymes turn
chemical reactions on and off. Their work had wide implications for
the treatment of diabetes amd other diseases. They were among a
few, select pioneers who first proved that biochemistry can explain
many biological and medical phenomena. Yet, at the same time, they
were pushing biochemistry Loser and closer into modern molecular
biology.
Gerty may have been a world leader in science, but she was stiD
a lowly research associate at Washington University. Unfortunately,
it took a world war to improve her status and that of other women
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Gerry Radnitz Cori
107
scientists in America's labs. While Carl worked on defense projects,
she kept their research going, but manpower shortages made it diffi-
cult to staff the lab. For the first time, women scientists were in de-
mand. To keep Arda Green, for example, the university was forced
to give her a full-time faculty position. Green's promotion may have
forced the university to give Gerty Cori equal treatment, too. At any
rate, in 1944, Gerty was promoted to associate professor and given
tenure at Washington University.
As the war was ending, Harvard University and the Rockefeller
Institute in New York City offered Carl and Gerty professorships. At
one point, a Harvard official who did not know that the Rockefeller
Institute was trying to lure the Coris away, confidendy informed
Rockefeller that the Coris were moving to Massachusetts. The
Rockefeller proposal was especially tempting. In response, Washing-
ton University apparently made Carl Cori a deal: he could chair a
new amd enlarged biochemistry department in larger quarters, and
Gerty Cori couth be a professor. They accepted.
By 1947, the Cori lab was the world's liveliest center for the
study of enzymes. It was more a research center or institute of schoL
ars than a school. The Coris accepted few graduate students. In-
stead, advanced researchers flocked from around the world to work
for a year or more beside the Coris. Eight alumni of the Cori lab
won Nobel Prizes: besides the Coris, the list includes Arthur
Kornberg, Earl W. Sutherland, and Edwin G. Krebs of the United
States, Severo Ochoa of Spain, Christian R. de Duve of Belgium, and
Luis E Leloir of Argentina.
"This was classic biochemistry, when enzymes were isolated and
their properties studied enzymes that by now are so old-hat to bio-
chemistry students that they probably forget blat they ever had to
be discovered. But a lot of them were discovered and crystallized in
Gerty Cori's lab," recalled a Cori lab veteran, David Brown, of
Washington University School of Medicine.
The lab made so many discoveries so quickly during the late
1940s and early 1950s that Carl worried a bit. "It makes me a lithe
umeasy, but you have to accept them," he conceded. Gerty herself
worked like an artist who brushes in the broad outlines of a painting
before focusing on the details; she liked to make an exciting discov-
ery first and only later go back to do precise controlled experiments.
Sometimes she became so excited, she jumped up and down.
By then, Gerty was running the laboratories. Carl had quit
working in the lab and was busy writing and supervising junior re-
searchers. Gerty, on the other hand, spent every working day
there except for a few days when the university finally convinced
her that, after twenty-five years, the rooms needed new paint. When
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108 NOBEL PRIZE WOMEN IN SCIENCE
she was not working at the lab bench, she was reading articles.
Somehow, she had convinced Washington University's librarians to
send her journals as they arrived, before they were put on the
shelves. During lulls in experiments, she raced through their articles
and rushed the journals on to the library.
Much of the life of the department was conducted—or at least
overheard—in the two-hundred-foot-long hallway between Gerty's
laboratory and Carl's office. The two conferred incessamdy, puffing
on cigarettes, pacing d r ough the smoke. If she had really hot news,
she started calling him while she was still several doors away from
his office, "Carlie! Carlie!" When a colleague made a particularly
exciting find, she ram down the hall to Carl shouting, "It's free glu-
cose! It's free glucose!" The department had only two telephone
lines. One was Carl's private line. The other was out m the hall it-
self, where everyone could overhear Gerty ordering groceries, plam-
ning menus with the housekeeper, or discussing after-school
activities with her son.
Gerty also arranged for the Mercantile Library, a private lend-
ing library in St. Louis, to deliver between five and seven books each
week to her office. By Friday, she had finished the books and pre-
pared her order for the next week's reading. She did tills week after
week. Gerty couth talk knowledgeably about anything from political
theory and sociology to art, literature, and grocery shopping. CoL
leagues were amazed at the breadth of her knowledge and the depth
of her understanding. As Gerty said, "I believe that the benefits of
two civilizations, a European education followed by the freedom and
opportunities of this country, have been essential to whatever contri-
butions I have been able to make in science."
Both Coris read deeply as well as widely outside science. On
their way to Stockholm to pick up their Nobel Prize, they stopped
offin Buffalo and talked with a young sociologist who had written a
scholarly article on the theory of revolutions. Gerty still screened the
scientific literature for the team, too. In 1947, Gerty Cori read
Oswald T. Avery's paper showing that DNA was the chemical basis
of heredity. She went clicking down the hall to tell Arthur Komberg,
"You must read dais. It is very important." She recognized the signifi-
camce of DNA five years before the famous molecular biology group
at the Califolnia Institute of Technology, according to Komberg.
Brown-bag lunches with the Coris were legendary, not for the
cuisine, but for the conversation. Lunch was a one-hour tutorial
every day. Talk ranged from research reports by eminent visitors to
the latest book the Coris had read. Carl spoke five languages, wrote
poetry, played the cello, amd could taste a bottle of wine and name
its vineyard. Gerty Cori was lively and vivacious, fun, and
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Gerry Radnitz Cori
109
humorous. "I really got my education there," recalled Neil Madsen
of the University of Alberta.
Gerty Cori may have been good-humored, but she did not like
to be scooped. When the Coris'friend Luis Leloir discovered a new
enzyme in Argentina, Gerty marched into the office of the young
man who had been working on a similar project. He had been
mildly distracted by his marriage and honeymoon during the month
when Leloir made his discovery, and Gerty disapproved. "You
missed it! You missed it!" she complained. Another day Kornberg
was sitting in the lab when Gerty burst in waving a journal. "We've
been attacked," she cried. Sheepishly, Kornberg looked over the ar-
ticle, trying to find the offending section; the point at issue was
trivial.
"Her behavior was not abnormal, although it would be re-
garded so for somebody who was not supposed to have that kind of
personality, like a homemaker or a companion," Komberg stressed.
Furthermore, as tough as Gerty Cori was, Carl Cori was tougher.
"In so many ways, she was very understanding, humane, and gener-
ous. It seems to me that that kind of dedication and determination to
do something creative and important is part of the job. She'd have
achieved less and been less recognizable as a creative scientist had
she done something different."
"Some people didn't get along with her," agreed her friend
Mildred Cohn, now professor emeritus of the University of PennsyL
vania and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. "That's
an understatement. One of the reasons was that she wasn't all sweet-
ness and light. Though she was a kind and caring person, she had a
very sharp tongue and was a very intelligent woman, and she didn't
suffer fools gladly.... But when she was critical, it was on an intellec-
tual level. She had very high standards, and it always amazed me
Blat she was so emotionally involved."
Gerty Cori had always been a passionate woman, kind and
gende as well as intense and volatile. But when a young researcher
forgot to turn off Gerty's water bath and it boiled dry, she raged,
"It's ruined, ruined, absolutely ruined! Haven't you any responsibil-
ity?" Edwin Krebs, now professor at the University of Washington
in Seattle, thought his career was ruined as well, but the eminent bi-
ologist Viktor Hamburger (chapter 9) was standing nearby, and he
was dearly amused. Afterward, Hamburger consoled Krebs. "You
mark my words, she'll think more about this, and she'll realize that
she was unduly harsh. But she won't apologize," Hamburger
warned. "Instead, when she comes in in the moming, she'll stick her
head in the door and say 'How's the work going?' And you should
accept Blat as am apology."
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110 NOBEL PRIZE WOMEN IN SCIENCE
Krebs protested, "But she's never stuck her head in the door be-
fore on her way in." The next moming, though, Krebs heard her
heels click-clacking down the hallway. Then she poked her head
through the door, and she asked, "How's work going?"
Years later,Jame Park had a similar experience. Park had stored
some vials in Gerty Cori's refrigerator. When she removed them,
Gerty came storming down the hall, convinced that some of her own
solutions had been taken. Park told her, "Mrs. Cori, I can't talk to
you about this right now. My mother is in the hospital, and she's
dying. This isn't that important, and we have to leave it at that." So
Gerty clacked on back up the hall in her heels, and the next day,
after Park's mother had died, Gerty poked her head in Park's lab to
say, "I'm very sorry to hear about your mother." Park replied, "She
was quite ill. She had emphysema." Gerty answered kindly, "Yes, I
know what that means." That was the way Gerty said she was sorry.
But the point, Park emphasized, is that Gerty had to know how the
solutions had been treated or else she couth not trust the results of
amyone's experiments. The integrity of the lab's data was at stake.
Gerty refused to compromise her scientific standards. "Gerty
Cori could cut you down to shreds if your mind wasn't working
right, and her standards were pretty high. But I thought it was
wonderful," noted Luis Glaser, now provost of the University of
Miami. As a graduate student, Glaser once spoke at the Coris' Fri-
day afternoon joulnal club, when recent articles were summarized
and discussed. The tradition was that no one left the room before
Gerty Cori. Glaser was so nervous that he raced through his ffty-
minute talk in a half hour. Arthur Komberg tried to keep the com-
ments going but gave up after ten minutes. With ten minutes
remaining, Gerty turned to her neighbor and started to talk in order
to teach Glaser a lesson: Professionals know how to fill a lecture
hour. "Everybody else sat there, sort of staring into space," Glaser
remembered.
Another day, Glaser was scheduled to give the lunch seminar.
As he walked to the seminar room with Gerty, she asked what he
planned to talk about. When he tom her, Gerty replied flaky, "That
bores me."
"I went on and gave the talk. What else could I do?" Glaser
laughed. "But she was right. In that sense, she couth be quite ruth-
less. She didn't ever hold back on telling you. But she told every-
body, whether it was a Nobel Prize winner or a graduate student. I
thought it was wonderful, and I still do. If she was just beating on a
poor, meek graduate student, that would have been unconscionable,
but to beat on everybody was wonderful."
Given Gerty's insistence on the purity of her experimental data,
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Gerry Radnitz Cori
111
one can only imagine her reaction to one of the laboratory's insulin
articles during the mid-1940s. The experimental evidence cited in
the article proved to be false—some thought fraudulent. And Gerty
spent almost a year holed up in her lab with Carl trying to straighten
out the fiasco despite the fact that she was not a coauthor. Carl had
been, even though he had not participated in the experiments. Those
had been done by others.
The Coris' insistence on intellectual integrity made their lab am
island of toleration in the midst of anti-Semitism and sexism. They
wamted discoveries that were accurate, but they did not care who
made them. St. Louis, like most American universities during the
1950s, was anti-Semitic. The community was only beginning to lift
its bars againstJews. Even as the Coris were hiring both women and
Jews, another Washington University department rejected a job can-
didate because his wife wasJewish.
Gerty Cori was particularly sympathetic to women researchers.
When Mildred Cohn joined the lab in 1946, Gerty made it dear that
she approved of working mothers. Her first words were, "I under-
stand you're more fortumate than I. You have both a daughter and a
son, and I have only a son." Said Cohn, "She endeared herself to me
the moment she said it."
When Barbara Illingworth Brown's babysitter quit, Gerty sent
her own housekeeper over to pinch-hit. "She was a very passionate
woman who could blow up, but she was very caring and kind,"
Cohn decided. Gerty found proper medical care for a sick young
secretary from New Zealand, slipped money to young people in
need, and helped visitors find housing. When she learned that Cohn
was not a member of the prestigious American Society of Biological
Chemists, she nominated Cohn and got her in that year. And when
Cohn was invited to give her first talk at another university, Gerty
was as excited as Cohn's mother. "She was very aware of women's
problems," Cohn concluded. Gerty once made a slighting remark
about another woman to Cohn and came in the next day conscience-
stricken. "Forget what I said yesterday," she begged Cohn. "It really
wasn't fair."
As far as Gerty Cori was concerned, women competed with
men in science by being equally serious, knowledgeable, and com-
mitted. She wore severe business suits to work and looked askance
at women who dressed fashionably. The women in the lab, whose
clothes were as dowdy as Gerty's, staged a contest to choose the
worst-dressed woman among them. Gerty Cori won easily. "She was
not a vain woman" Park decided.
For the times, Washington University was good for women.
When its nepotism rules were remodified during the 1950s, husbands
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112 NOBEL PRIZE WOMEN IN SCIENCE
and wives could work at the university if they were in different de-
partments. Many universities at the time banned wives from employ-
ment anywhere in the institution. When the new rules were
published, the c' -cello wrote Gerty a personal letter saying that
the regulations were not aimed at her. Carl Cori's attitude about hir-
ing had always been that rules were meant to be broken.
Gerty Cori had had firsthand experience with discrimination.
When she first came to Washington University, the administration
had regarded her as Carl's assistant. Carl Cori, on the other hand,
was a towering figure in biochemistry. Every year he got a sizable
grant from Eli Lilly 8; Company, simply by writing a one-sentence
letter: "I would like to continue my studies in carbohydrate metabo-
lism." He won award after award, most of them alone. For example,
he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal
Society of London without Gerty; he received the prestigious Albert
Lasker Basic Medical Research Award in 1946 without her, too.
Even after Gerty won the Nobel Prize, organizations like the Ameri-
cam Chemical Society continued to honor Carl but not Gerty.
In 1944, Washington University's dean asked Gerty to prepare
a report "on Cori's work" to accompany a grant application to the
Rockefeller Foumdation. Gerty's response referred to "the Coris" and
how "thy discovered...th¢7 isolated," and so on. To his credit, the
dean passed the report on unedited. At the Rockefeller Foumdation,
however, someone crossed out "the Coris" and "they" and penciled
in "Dr. Cori" and "he." If Gerty had known she would have been
furious.
In 1946, Carl became chair of the new biochemistry depart-
ment. He promoted Gerty to full professor as of July 1, 1947. After
sixteen years, she finally had tenure, status, and pay more commen-
surate with her abilities.
The year 1947 brought Gerty both the worst of news and the
best of news. That summer, the Coris left for their annual month's
vacation in the Rocky Mountains. While they were hiking on
Snowmass Mountain, Gerty fainted. Snowmass is a fourteen-
thousamd-foot-high peak near Aspen, Colorado. As physicians, the
Coris immediately guessed that she must have a problem with the
hemoglobin in her blood and that it had been exacerbated by the
high altitude. Back in St. Louis, Gerty visited a physician at the medi-
cal school, but he was unable to explain the incident.
A few weeks later, on October 24, the Coris learned that they
had both won the Nobel Prize. They received the prize for discover-
ing the enzymes that convert glycogen into sugar and back again to
glycogen. "Your synthesis of glycogen in the test tube is beyond
doubt one of the most brilliant achievements in modem biochemis-
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Gerry Radnitz Cori
113
try," the Nobel Committee declared. The Coris shared their award
with their friend Bernardo A. Houssay of Argentina, who had
shown that the pituitary glamd plays a key hormonal role in sugar
metabolism.
The morning of the announcement, reporters hovered around
the department in disbelief as the Coris went about their business as
usual. They had planned to attend a laboratory lecture from eight to
refine A.M., and nothing could persuade them to skip it. Gerty was a
realist about the prize. As she noted, "Salaries and prestige [for basic
research] are not very high in our society. Of course, where the ex-
ceDence of the work is certified by some medal, prestige follows, but
it is then not so much attached to admiration for 'useless' work but
to the medal "
A few weeks before the Coris were to leave for Stockholm in
triumph, Gerty's physician told them his devastating diagnosis.
Gerty was suffering from an unknown, fatal type of amemia. Her
body was not producing red blood cods, and her bone marrow was
being replaced gradually by fibrous tissue. Why, no one could say.
The official diagnosis was agnogenic myeloid dysplasia, meaning
only that the bone marrow was malfunctioliillg for unknown rea-
sons. She would be increasingly dependent on blood transfusions for
the rest of her life. Just when the Nobel Prize signaled the end of
Gerty Cori's long struggle for recognition, she began her long
struggle to survive and keep working.
Today, Larner thinks that her illness may have been triggered by
the X rays that she studied in Buffalo during the 1920s. Excessive
amounts of radiation are known to cause fibrosis of the bone
marrow.
Despite the tragic news, Gerty amd Carl continued with their
plans to attend the Nobel ceremonies in Stockholm as if nothing had
happened. They stopped off in Buffalo and visited parts of Europe
on the way. As with ad their work, they split up their Nobel Lecture.
Carl gave the first and third parts, and Gerty presented the second
part. Only Carl spoke at the banquet. Looking at Gerty, he thanked
the Nobel Committee for including her in the prize. "That the award
should have included my wife as well has been a source of deep
satisfaction to me. Our collaboration began thirty years ago when
we were still medical students at the University of Prague and has
continued ever since. Our efforts have been largely complemen-
tary, and one without the other would not have gone as far as in
combination."
Back home, they shared part of their $24,460.50 prize with
several coworkers on the phosphorylase project, including Sidney
Colowick, Arda Green, and Gerhard Schmidt. Colowick had
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114 NOBEL PRIZE WOMEN IN SCIENCE
published articles with the Coris and, when his name appeared be-
tween theirs, quipped that he was "the meat m the Cori sandwich."
Green, who had crystallized phosphorylase for the Coris, used her
money to buy a Chinese rug. Schmidt bought a car and called it his
Nobel Prize.
For the next ten years Gerty Cori survived on blood transfu-
sions, Carl's care, and work. Carl monitored her hemoglobin inces-
santly and often administered her transfusions. Gerty kept a small,
metal-framed army cot with a thin mattress in her office to rest on,
although she usually spent the time reading scientific journals. She
and Carl traveled ad over the world trying different treatments, but
each one had damaging side effects. Transfusions during the 1950s
were made of whole blood, and over time her body produced more
and more antibodies to the cellular elements in the blood. After each
transfusion, she felt sick and feverish. Carl devised a treatment that
helped for about a year. Later, when her spleen was removed in an
experimental procedure, her liver took over and grew so big she
looked almost pregnant. But the operation kept her alive and work-
mg for several more years.
Publicly, she ignored her illness. Only once in ten years did she
say amything downbeat to her friend Cohn. "You know, Mildred,"
she said then "if something like this happens to you, it would be
better if a ton of bricks fell on you." Later, with gallows humor, she
joked that she had gone to a party "to squelch the rumors that I'm
dead."
Above ad, she kept working. After she received the Nobel Prize,
she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, eight years
after Carl. President Harry S. Truman appointed her to the newly
formed National Science Foundation board. She served two terms,
getting massive blood transfusions before each long, turboprop flight
to Washington, D.C. She attended meetings when other patients
would have stayed in bed. The sessions were important, though,
because the federal goverllmeut had decided to support scientific
research and policy guidelines were being established.
Gerty Cori was instrumental in defeating a proposal made by
the president of Harvard University James B. Conant. Conant did
not want the NSF to fumd researchers with M.D. degrees for experi-
ments involving animals. He wanted only Ph.D.-trained researchers
to do animal research. Gerty argued back, citing M.D.-trained scien-
tists like herself who had won Nobel Prizes. Eventually, Conarlt's
proposal died for lack of support. At another NSF board meeting,
she cornered its executive director; she was furious that one of her
postdoctoral fellows had failed to win an NSF fellowship. "We seL
dom make mistakes on choosing our people," the director protested.
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Gerry Radnitz Cori
115
"Well, you made a mistake this time," she argued. The youmg man
got his fellowship.
With iron determination, Gerty Cori did some of her most im-
portamt work during her illness. She started with a bet withJoseph
Larner. Lamer had come up with an idea about a group of children's
diseases called glycogen storage diseases. At the time, they were
thought to be one disease because the children accumulate abnormal
amounts of glycogen in their tissues, especially in the liver. Lamer
suggested that the condition might be caused by the lack of a par-
ticular enzyme. Gerty bet that another enzyme was missing. It
turned out they were both right. Larner's missing enzyme caused
one form of the disease while Gerty's caused another. Gerty was
thrilled. She jumped up shouting, "This is a molecular disease!" The
only other disease known to be caused by am altered molecule was
sickle cell anemia, which Linus Pauling had just discovered.
Gerty devoted her remaining years to sorting out the glycogen
storage diseases. Eventually, she proved that four different diseases
are caused by a defect in or absence of a particular enzyme. Today,
ten or more glycogen storage diseases are known and some of them
are still fatal. Her work opened the entire field of genetic diseases for
study. As Glaser observed, "Now that inherited diseases are a great
growth industry, it is hard to imagine how revolutionary her accom-
plishment was—that someone couth take a piece of liver in a biopsy
from a patient and determine what was wrong with them and why
they had particular symptoms. It was a major finding, really a mile-
stone m biochemistry amd our understanding of a whole category of
diseases "
It was also a spectacular piece of molecular biology at a time
when the field had hardly begun. It remains "an unmatched scien-
tific achievement," declared their colleague Hemman Kalckar. Gerty's
work had come full circle, back to her early interest in children's
medicine in Vienna.
As Gerty weakened, friends from the old days sensed her anger
and bitterness. Her old cheerfulness had gone, and she was more
volatile and more inclined to explode with frustration. When Carl
hired nurses to look after her, she fired them. "I think she wanted
him to take care of her," Cohn said. "They were so close.... It was
the most amazing closeness." On a visit to London for a scientific
congress in 1955, Gerty almost collapsed while sightseeing. In
Oxford, she fell on the street and was carried to a friend's home to
recuperate.
The summer of 1957, Gerty Cori published her last article, a re-
view of children's glycogen storage diseases. By fall, Carl was carry-
ing her from room to room at the lab. The month before she died,
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116 NOBEL PRIZE WOMEN IN SCIENCE
she was bedridden at home. Carl cared for the household, looked
after her, and went to work late. Gerty, the woman who had gobbled
up five weighty books a week for decades, was reading mysteries. "I
can't read amydling serious anymore." she complained. On October
26, 1957, Gerty Cori died at age sixty-one, at home, alone with Carl.
Scientists from around the world arrived for her memorial ser-
vioe. Houssay flew up from Argentina, am English friend came from
London and Ochoa arrived from Spain. In his eulogy, Ochoa re-
members Gerty as "a human being of great spiritual depth...modest,
kind, generous and affectionate to a superlative degree and a lover of
nature and art." Just before a string quartet played Beethoven, a
record was broadcast. Gerty had made it for Edward R. Murrow's
Ihts I Believe series. Through the church came Gerty's voice in a ring-
ing aflulnatioll of her love for science, truth, and humanity. She said:
Honesty, which stands mosdy for intellectual integrity, courage,
and kindness are still the virtues I admire, though with advancing
years the emphasis has been slighdy shifted and kindness now
seems more important to me than in my youth. The love for and
dedication to one's work seems to me to be the basis for happi-
ness. For a research worker, the unforgotten moments of his lite
are those rare ones, which come after years of plodding work,
when the veil over nature's secret seems suddenly to Ifft and when
what was dark and chaotic appears in a dear and beautiful light
and pattern.
EPILOGUE
Carl Cori retired from Washington University School of Medicine
in 1966 and took a position with Harvard University and the Mas-
sachusetts General Hospital. His friends were happy when he re-
married. Although his scientific achievements after Gerty's death
were never as great as they had been during the years of their part-
nership, he continued research until shortly before his death at age
eighty-eight in 1984. During his last illness he told a visitor, "You
know, Gerty was heroic."
# # #
Representative terms from entire chapter:
nobel prize
