Gerty Cori, a Life Dedicated to Chemical and Medical Research

Abstract

This article shows the life and work of Gerty Cori, a woman born in Czechoslovakia and who later became a naturalized American, who spent her whole life researching, together with her husband, in the laboratory to find the cause of some diseases, particularly those of a metabolic type, and to be able to find substances that alleviate their effects. The result of this joint work was the obtaining by both, together with the physiologist Bernardo Houssay, of the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology in 1947. The objective of this article is to complete the scarce existing biographies about this woman with new data that highlight the most outstanding events of her life, quite a few of which are still largely ignored. A relatively complete information on the presence of female chemists in the awarded Nobel Prizes is also shown.