Gerty Cori

Born in Prague in 1896, Gerty Cori entered medical school when women rarely did and met Carl Cori in anatomy class; they married upon graduation in 1920. The couple emigrated to the United States in 1922 as Europe deteriorated, and she pressed on with laboratory research despite securing only poorly paid positions while her husband advanced - institutions actively discouraged his collaboration with her, but he refused to stop. Working together, they discovered the Cori cycle: the mechanism by which glycogen breaks down into lactic acid in muscle, then gets resynthesized and stored for energy. The Nobel came in 1947, shared with Carl and Argentine physiologist Bernardo Houssay. She died in 1957 after a decade-long fight with myelosclerosis, still working in the lab until the end.