This talk examines the gendered dynamics of the joint research program that developed between Prague-born, Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Dr. Gerty T. Cori and her husband Dr. Carl F. Cori during their first ten years in the United States. Despite coming up against gender discrimination, demands for clinically-related laboratory work, and institutional objections to their research partnership, the Coris co-authored numerous papers on carbohydrate (sugar) metabolism throughout the 1920s, work which culminated in their characterization of one of the earliest metabolic cycles to be biochemically described, a cycle of how sugar flows through the animal body which was eventually termed the “Cori Cycle.”

About the Speaker:

Gina Surita is a historian of the modern biomedical sciences. She completed her PhD in History of Science at Princeton University in 2022.