When it actually happened
The first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was Gerty Cori, in 1947. This was twenty years before 1967 and has no link to that year. She shared the prize with her husband, Carl Cori, and with the Argentine physiologist Bernardo Houssay. The Coris were honoured for their discovery of how glycogen, the body’s stored form of sugar, is broken down and rebuilt, and Houssay was recognised for separate work on the role of hormones from the pituitary gland in sugar metabolism. The Coris received half of the prize, and Houssay the other half.
For comparison, the 1967 prize in this field went to Ragnar Granit, Haldan Keffer Hartline and George Wald for their work on the processes of vision in the eye.
Early life and training
Gerty Theresa Radnitz was born in Prague in 1896, when the city was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Girls’ schooling of that period did not usually lead to a university place, and she had to prepare for the entrance requirements with extra study before she could begin. She studied medicine at the German University in Prague and received her medical degree in 1920.
It was in medical school that she met Carl Cori, a fellow student, and the two began working together on research. They married in 1920.
Moving to America
The Coris left Europe in the early 1920s. Carl moved first to the United States, and Gerty followed. Their first position was at a cancer research institute in Buffalo, New York. There the working conditions were not easy. Reports commonly say that the institute’s management discouraged the couple from working together, and Gerty was in a junior role, though the details of those discussions are not fully documented.
In 1931 the couple moved to Washington University in St. Louis, where Carl became head of the pharmacology department. Gerty joined the university as a research associate. Her status and pay were lower than her husband’s for many years, and she became a full professor only in 1947, the year of the prize. Her position illustrates a familiar pattern of the time: highly capable women in science were often placed in lower-ranking posts, even when their work was central to a laboratory.
The St. Louis laboratory
The Cori laboratory became a place that attracted researchers from many countries. Several scientists who worked there later became prominent, and a number of them also won Nobel Prizes, so the laboratory is often described as unusually productive.
The Coris worked as a pair, and their publications were joint. They studied the chemistry of carbohydrates in the body, using experiments on tissue and on isolated enzymes, a technique that was demanding for the equipment of the time.
The Cori cycle
The work for which the pair are best known is the cycle that bears their name. In simple terms, when muscles work hard they break down glucose and produce lactic acid. The lactic acid travels through the bloodstream to the liver, where it is converted back into glucose. That glucose can return to the muscles, completing a loop. The Cori cycle helped explain how the body keeps its supply of energy balanced during exercise and rest.
They also identified an important intermediate compound, glucose-1-phosphate, sometimes called the Cori ester, and they described the enzyme reactions that build and break down glycogen. Later in her career, Gerty Cori studied inherited conditions in which glycogen is not handled normally, and her work is credited with showing that a defect in a single enzyme could cause a disease.
Illness and legacy
In the years around the prize, Gerty Cori became ill with a blood disorder, and she continued to work in the laboratory while unwell. She died in 1957, aged sixty-one. The American Chemical Society later honoured her, and she has been commemorated in other ways, including a place among the best-known women scientists of the century.
She is often described as the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize in science, though she was born in Prague and became an American citizen later, so the label depends on how the nationality is defined.
The women who followed in medicine
After her, the medicine prize went to women only occasionally in the following decades. Rosalyn Yalow won in 1977 for the development of radioimmunoassay, and Barbara McClintock won in 1983 for work on genetic elements in maize. A heart transplant, performed for the first time in December 1967 by Christiaan Barnard in Cape Town, illustrates how fast medicine was changing during that decade, although the people involved in that operation did not receive a Nobel Prize for it.
Summary
Gerty Cori’s 1947 award made her the first woman to win in physiology or medicine. The science behind it, the cycle of sugar between muscle and liver, remains a staple of biochemistry teaching. The obstacles she faced, and the fact that recognition arrived when she was already fifty-one, make her career a useful reference point in the history of women in science.