Carl Cori—Nobel Laureate in Medicine or Physiology

Abstract

The 1947 Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology was awarded to Carl Ferdinand Cori and his wife Gerty T. Cori (1896-1957) “for their discovery of the course of the catalytic conversion of glycogen.” The prize was shared with an Argentinean physiologist, Bernardo A. Houssay (1887-1971), who won the prize for his discovery of the role of a pituitary hormone in the metabolism of sugar. Carl and his wife discovered the chemical reactions by which glycogen (the form in which sugar is stored in the animal body) is changed into a form of glucose that can be used by cells to produce energy. The series of reactions that accomplishes this is known as the Cori cycle and is basic to an understanding of the life processes of animals. Carl Cori, the son of a professor of zoology at the University of Prague, was born on December 5, 1896, in Prague, Czechoslovakia. His mother was the daughter of a professor of mathematical physics. In 1898, Carl's family moved to Trieste on the Adriatic Sea (then part of Austria-Hungary, now part of Italy), where his father became director of the Marine Biological Station. From 1906 to 1914, Carl was a student at the Gymnasium in Trieste. In 1914, he entered the German University of Prague, but his education was interrupted by World War I (1914-1918). During the war, Carl served in the Austrian army on the Italian front. He was assigned to the ski corps, a bacteriological laboratory, and a hospital for infectious diseases during his military service. In 1918, he returned to the university to continue his studies. After Carl received his MD degree from the German University of Prague in 1920, he married Gerty, whom he had met when both were students. The Coris moved to Vienna, where Carl was an assistant at the First Medical Clinic. Later, he was an assistant in pharmacology at the University of Graz (about 90 miles southwest of Vienna). In 1922, the Coris emigrated to the United States, and both obtained positions at the New York State Institute for the Study of Malignant Disease in Buffalo (later known as the Roswell Park Memorial Institute). The Coris were interested in carbohydrate metabolism in normal and malignant tissue, and during their early years in Buffalo, they concentrated their research on the metabolism of carbohydrates in tumor cells. They also investigated the effects of ovariectomy on tumor-cell growth. The Coris became US citizens in 1928, and in 1931, they moved to St Louis, Mo, where Carl was appointed professor of pharmacology at Washington University School of Medicine. During the 1930s, the Coris investigated how glycogen, the carbohydrate stored in the liver and in muscle, was broken down in the body and resynthesized. Two decades earlier, German biochemist Otto Meyerhof (1884-1951) had stated that glycogen was converted to lactic acid in working muscle, but he provided no details about the conversion. In 1936, the Coris discovered the activated intermediate, glucose l-phosphate, now known as the Cori ester. They demonstrated that it is the first step in the conversion of glycogen into glucose. During World War II (1939-1945), Carl was responsible for a laboratory at Washington University that was under contract to the Office of Scientific Research and Development to study the effect of toxic gases on enzyme systems. In 1942, the Coris isolated and purified the enzyme responsible for catalyzing the glycogen-Cori ester reaction, and with this, they achieved the test-tube synthesis of glycogen (1943). This proof of the interconversion allowed them to formulate the Cori cycle, postulating that liver glycogen is converted to blood glucose, which is reconverted to glycogen in muscle, where its breakdown to lactic acid provides the energy used in muscle contraction. Studying the way in which hormones affect carbohydrate metabolism in animals, the Coris showed that epinephrine induces the formation of a phosphorylase enzyme, which favored the conversion of glucose to glycogen, and that insulin causes the removal of sugar from the blood. After the death of his wife in 1957, Carl devoted his efforts to studying the physicochemical action of enzymes involved in the breakdown of glycogen to lactic acid. After his retirement from Washington University in 1966, Carl was appointed visiting professor of biochemistry at Harvard University School of Medicine (Cambridge, Mass), where he continued his research until 1984. During this time, he purified the enzyme glucose-6-phosphatase and studied its role in the regulation of blood glucose in diabetic patients. Carl wrote more than 200 scientific articles and was honored by institutions and societies throughout the world. He died in Cambridge on October 20, 1984, at the age of 87 years. He was honored on a stamp issued by Gabon in 1995.