Abstract
The other part of the Nobel Prize has gone to Prof. Carl F. Cori and Dr. Gerty T. Cori, of the Washington University School of Medicine. Prof, and Mrs. Cori have pursued a line of investigation which has now to some extent merged with that of Houssay and his colleagues. The Coris have investigated for the past twenty years or so the changes undergone by the glucose molecule, and the enzymes responsible for the changes, in the processes of glycogen formation and breakdown, in the animal body. In 1939 they were able to prepare for the first time an enzyme which catalysed the synthesis in vitro of a polysaccharide resembling starch and glycogen. More recently they have examined the action of the enzyme hexokinase, responsible for the phosphorylation in the body of glucose to glucose-6-phosphate at the expense of the conversion of adenosine triphosphate to adenosine diphosphate. The Coris have been able to show that anterior pituitary extract and insulin exert antagonistic actions on this enzyme system in vitro, anterior pituitary extracts depressing hexokinase activity, and insulin neutralizing this depression. This observation goes a long way to explain in terms of enzyme systems the action of some of the hormones the physiological investigation of which has been the pursuit of Houssay and his collaborators.
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Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine, 1947: Prof. Carl F. Cori and Mrs. Cori. Nature 160, 599 (1947). https://doi.org/10.1038/160599c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/160599c0