Cori was born Gerty Theresa Radnitz on August 15, 1896, in Prague, the daughter of Otto and Martha Radnitz. Her father was a chemist who became manager of sugar refineries after inventing a successful method for refining sugar. Her mother, a friend of Franz Kafka, was a culturally sophisticated woman.
Gerty graduated from a school for girls in 1912. Since she wished to study chemistry, she was obliged to prepare for the university entrance examination (matura). After passing the examination at the Tetschen Realgymnasium in Prague she entered the medical school of the German University of Prague (Charles University) in 1914. She received the M.D. degree in 1920 and married a fellow student, Carl Ferdinand Cori, in August of the same year, taking his last name.
After two years at the Karolinen Children’s Hospital in Vienna, where Cori worked on the problem of temperature regulation in a case of congenital myxedema before and after thyroid therapy, she came to the United States to join her husband at the New York State Institute for the Study of Malignant Diseases in Buffalo, New York. In 1931 the Coris went to the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, where Gerty Cori was appointed research associate in the department of pharmacology. In 1946 the Coris moved to the department of biochemistry at the same university, and in 1947 Gerty became a professor of biochemistry, the post she occupied at her death.
At Buffalo, in spite of institutional pressure for Gerty to work on selected aspects of cancer, the Coris initiated a close collaboration in research on the metabolism of carbohydrates in animals. Their first joint report on this subject appeared in 1923; and during the succeeding dozen years they described, in a series of important papers, the effects of the hormones epinephrine and insulin on carbohydrate metabolism. During the course of this work, the Coris demonstrated that epinephrine increases the rate of conversion of liver glycogen to glucose, an effect counteracted by insulin, and also that epinephrine increases the rate of conversion of muscle glycogen to lactate, with the formation of hexosemonophosphate. A closer study of the hexosemonophosphate led the Coris to discover and to isolate, in 1936, a new phosphorylated intermediate (glucose-1-phosphate) in carbohydrate metabolism. In 1938 they described its enzymatic interconversion with glucose-6-phosphate, already known to be formed by the phosphorylation of glucose in an enzyme-catalyzed reaction involving adenosine triphosphate (ATP). The Coris then demonstrated that the formation of glucose-1-phosphate from glycogen is effected by a new enzyme, phosphorylase, that catalyzes the cleavage and synthesis of polysaccharides. Before these discoveries had been made, it was widely believed that the metabolic breakdown of glycogen involved its hydrolysis to glucose; the Coris showed the existence of an enzymatic mechanism for the phosphorolysis of the glycosidic bonds of a polysaccharide.
The crystallization and characterization of rabbit muscle phosphorylase (fully described in 1943) laid the groundwork for later studies by the Coris and others on the hormonal control of its enzymatic activity. Furthermore, the Coris identified and isolated other enzymes involved in the formation and breakdown of the highly branched glycogen molecule; this knowledge made it possible for them to effect the first synthesis of glycogen in the test tube. For these achievements Carl and Gerty Cori were awarded the 1947 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, which they shared with Bernardo A. Houssay of Argentina. Gerty was the third woman to receive a Nobel Prize in science, the other two being Marie Curie and Irene Joliot-Curie.
In subsequent work Gerty used the enzymes involved in the biological cleavage of glycogen as tools for the chemical definition of its molecular structure. This was achieved in 1952, almost exactly 100 years after the discovery of glycogen by Claude Bernard. The insights into the chemistry of glycogen, and of the enzymes concerned with its biological transformations, made it possible for Gerty Cori to illuminate in 1953 the nature of the glycogen storage diseases in children. She recognized two groups of disorders, one involving excessive amounts of normal glycogen and the other characterized by abnormally branched glycogen, and showed them to be a consequence of deficiencies or changes in particular enzymes of the metabolic pathway. Gerty Cori’s work thus demonstrated the central importance of the isolation and characterization of individual enzymes, both for the structural definition of the macromolecules on which they act and for the understanding of dysfunctions of metabolic processes in which these enzymes participate.
Collaborating with her husband, scientist Gerty Cori made important discoveries about the human body's metabolism of sugar. She won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1947 and later went on to study diseases known as glycogen storage disorders, demonstrating the significant role enzymes play in metabolism.
She also made significant contributions in two major areas of biochemistry, which increased understanding of how the body stores and uses sugars and other carbohydrates.
Gerty converted to Catholicism, enabling her and her husband Carl to marry in the Roman Catholic Church.
She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1953. She was as well a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Gerty married Carl Cori in 1920, and the couple had one son. She was survived by her husband and their son, Tom Cori, who married the daughter of conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly. Carl Cori remarried in 1960 to Anne Fitzgerald-Jones.
