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A truly collaborative relationship
Carl Cori accepted a position as a biochemist at the State Institute for the Study of Malignant Disease in 1922. Gerty Cori joined him six months later, after taking a position as an assistant pathologist. The two were never apart again professionally. At the beginning of their tenure at the Institute, the Coris encountered opposition to their working together. Gerty Cori was told she would lose her job if she strayed from her laboratory in the pathology department. Soon, however, their colleagues came to understand and respect the Coris wish to work together, which they did until Gerty's death in 1957. In his autobiography, Carl Cori related one other incident when the Coris encountered opposition to their working collaboratively. He was offered a position at a good university, with three stipulations: That he take speech lessons, that he cease working on insulin, and that he stop collaborating with his wife. He declined because the last two stipulations were unacceptable. On one visit to the university, Gerty was told that it was "un-American" for a husband and wife to work together.1 Eventually most opposition to their working together melted away, but Gerty Cori did run up against other forms of sex discrimination. When the Coris were hired at Washington University, she received one-tenth Carl's salary, even though they were equal partners in the laboratory. It was a truly collaborative relationship. David Kipnis, who was a postdoctoral fellow in the Coris' laboratory, says: "They were a remarkable pair. Gerty would have flights of fancy. She'd come up with extraordinary ideas. Cori had the ability to put them into concrete questions to answer. And therefore as a team they were extraordinary."2 Their son Tom says his mother had the ideas; then they both would go into the laboratory to execute the idea or disprove it.3 Their closeness extended beyond their scientific endeavors; as Mildred Cohn, who knew the Coris and has written and has written about them, relates, they complemented each other intellectually: "She would start a sentence, he would finish it."4 Carl Cori summed up the nature of their partnership in his remarks at the Nobel banquet in 1947: "Our collaboration began 30 years ago when were still medical students at the University of Prague and has continued ever since. Our efforts have been largely complementary, and one with the other would not have gone as far as in combination."5
1 Carl F. Cori, "The Call of Science," Annual Review of Biochemistry 38 (1969): 11.
2 David Kipnis, Living St. Louis, a production of KETC in St. Louis, Missouri. Dr. Kipnis repeated this idea in a telephone interview conducted by Judah Ginsberg, July 6, 2004.
3 Telephone interview with Tom Cori, conducted by Judah Ginsberg, July 2, 2004.
4 Telephone interview with Mildred Cohn, conducted by Judah Ginsberg, June 29, 2004. A slightly different version of this appears 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. 72.
5 Carl F. Cori, Speech at the Nobel Banquet, in Stockholm, Sweden, December 10, 1947.
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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