Gerty Cori was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Cori shared the 1947 prize with her husband, Carl Ferdinand Cori, and Bernardo Houssay. The Coris were recognized for discovering how the body converts and uses glycogen, a stored form of glucose. Their work identified the sequence now called the Cori cycle.
The Cori cycle explains how muscles produce lactate during strenuous activity and how the liver converts that lactate back into glucose. It remains a key concept in biochemistry and exercise physiology.
Gerty Cori was born in Prague and later worked in the United States. She and Carl often collaborated scientifically, despite institutions that treated them unequally. Her Nobel award came decades after Marie Curie became the first woman to win any Nobel Prize, in Physics in 1903.