Carl Cori biography
Date of birth : 1896-12-05
Date of death : 1984-10-20
Birthplace : Prague, Czech Republic
Nationality : Czech
Category : Science and Technology
Last modified : 2011-08-22
Credited as : Biochemist, pharmacologist, Nobel Prize
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Carl Cori's first work published in a peer-reviewed journal was a study on ants, written when he was 17. His father was a professor of zoology, his grandfather was a professor of physics, and Cori studied under Otto Loewi. He spoke seven languages -- English, Italian, French, German, Latin, Greek, Spanish, plus a workable fluency in Czech.
Cori spent most of his career in collaboration with his wife, Gerty Cori. They met and married in medical school, and in their most famous work they isolated phosphorylase, the enzyme that begins the conversion of glucose into glycogen, or animal starch into sugar, in the human body. For this work, key to understanding the body's food storage system, they became the first husband-wife team to win the Nobel Prize. The honor, bestowed in 1947, was shared with Argentine physiologist Bernardo Houssay.
