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The final years
The excitement and reward of receiving the Noble Prize in 1947 was overshadowed by the knowledge that Gerty Cori had developed an incurable and fatal illness, myelosclerosis, which leads to anemia. The Coris discovered Gerty's illness while mountain climbing in the Rockies in the summer of 1947. She suffered for ten years. Carl later wrote that "she bore [the disease] with great fortitude and without letup in her scientific interests."1 She continued her research almost until the end, working on the enzymatic lesions in different forms of glycogen storage disease and describing with Joseph Larner a new enzyme they called "the debrancher." Mildred Cohn writes that near the end of her life, Gerty Cori said: "I gave a party to squelch the rumor that I was dead."2 She died at home in 1957. In 1960 Carl Cori married Anne Fitzgerald-Jones. The two shared many common interests, including archaeology, art, and literature. In 1966 he retired from Washington University and was appointed visiting professor of Biological Chemistry at Harvard Medical School. At the same time he maintained a laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital, continuing his research until he became too ill in the 1980s. Cori's research research went in a new direction in thee years as he became interested in on relation of mutations of an enzyme, glucose-6-phospatase, to metabolic diseases. In this work he began collaborating with a noted geneticist Salomé Glüecksohn-Waelsch of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. Cori and Glüecksohn-Waelsch published their first joint paper in 1968 and the last in 1983, when Carl became too ill to continue research. Carl Cori died in 1984.
1 Carl F. Cori, "The Call of Science," Annual Review of Biochemistry 38 (1969): 18.
2 Quoted in Mildred Cohn, "Carl and Gerty Cori: A Personal Recollection," in Creative Couples in the Sciences, eds. Helena Pycior, Nancy G. Slack, and Pnina G. Abir-am (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), p. 81.
European backgrounds |
A truly collaborative relationship |
The "Cori cycle"
Washington University, the "Cori ester," and the synthesis of glycogen |
The final years
Landmark designation and acknowledgments
Copyright
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