DR. CARL CORI, 87, OF CAMBRIDGE; SHARED 1947 NOBEL IN MEDICINE
Author:
Date: Sunday, October 21, 1984
Page: 82
Section: OBITUARY
Dr. Carl Ferdinand Cori, who with his late wife Gerty Theresa Radnitz won
the 1947 Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology, died yesterday in his
Cambridge home. He was 87.
They received the award for their joint research that resulted in the
discovery of the catalytic metabolism of glycogen, part of the body's food
storage system.
Dr. Cori was named after the Carl Ferdinand Univeristy of Prague. He was
born in Prague, the son of a professor of marine biology. He came to the
United States from Vienna in 1922 and became an American citizen in 1928.
He was educated at the Gymnasium, a classical high school, of Trieste,
Italy, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and received his
medical degree from the University of Prague.
Dr. Cori and his wife, who died in 1957, met in medical school at the
University of Prague and were married a few months after their graduation.
Both joined the Washington University Medical School faculty in 1931. In
1947, he became professor of biological chemistry and department head, the
same year they won the Nobel Prize.
By the 1960s, Dr. Cori's research dealt with the regulation of carbohydrate
metabolism in muscles and the liver, and with the effects of such hormones as
insulin and epinephrine on this metabolic cycle.
In 1960, he married Anne FitzGerald Jones.
He became a member of the Harvard Medical School faculty in its biological
chemistry department in 1966 and was also a biochemist at Massachusetts
General Hospital.
Dr. Cori spoke eight languages - English, Italian, French, German, Latin,
Greek, Spanish, and some Czech, and could quote Homer in Greek.
In a 1969 annual review of a biochemistry publication, Dr. Cori wrote that
both sides of his family consisted of academics and "rejections of the values
of one's parents was not as prevalent then as it is today," and that therefore
it would have been unusual for him to go into any other direction than
academic.
In 1914, at 17, Dr. Cori had published his first work of research on the
study of ants. The collection of ants was later given to the Museum of Natural
History in Vienna, where some are still exhibited.
During his career, he received the Lasker Award of the American Public
Health Assn., the Sugar Research Foundation Award from the National Academy of
Sciences, the Squibb Award from the Assn. for the Study of Internal
Secretions, the Willard Gibbs Medal from the Chicago section of the American
Chemical Society, and the St. Louis Award.
He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American
Philosophical Society.
Besides his wife, he leaves a son by his first wife, Carl Thomas; four
stepchildren, and two granddaughters.
Funeral services will be private.
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