1940's Science and Technology | Cori, Gerty Theresa 1896-1957

BIOCHEMIST, PHYSICIAN

Nobel Prize Winner.

Gerty Theresa Cori was the first American to receive the Nobel Prize for medicine or physiology. She shared the 1947 prize with her husband, Carl Cori, and with Argentinian Bernardo Houssay.

Early Years.

Born Gerty Theresa Radnitz in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Cori entered the medical school of the German University of Prague in 1914 and graduated in 1920, the same year she married Carl Cori, a fellow student with whom she shared an interest in laboratory research. They collaborated on their first project, a study of the immune bodies in blood, in the first year they were married.

Research in the United States.

The Coris immigrated to the United States in 1922 and worked at the New York Institute for the Study of Malignant Diseases (later Roswell Park Memorial Institute) in Buffalo. They continued to work together on research...