The Winners

Argentina's shy, black-eyed Dr. Bernardo Alberto Houssay is often referred to as "the world's greatest living physiologist" (TIME, May 5). Medical researchers are also enthusiastic about a gifted pair of biochemists at St. Louis' Washington University: shy Dr. Carl Ferdinand Cori and his redhaired, vivacious wife Gerty. Few scientists were surprised last week when Stockholm announced that Houssay and Cori & Cori had been jointly awarded the 1947 Nobel Prize in medicine.

Dr. Houssay's award set a precedent: no South American scientist had ever been en-Nobeled before. To the independent, 60-year-old Argentine, who was fired from the University of Buenos Aires by Dictator Juan Peron, the Nobel windfall ($24,460, half the prize) would come in handy. The award was for Houssay's studies of the pituitary, the tiny gland at the base of the brain. He had shown that pituitary hormones, like messengers from a general staff headquarters, control the activity of all other ductless glands in the body. He had also discovered that pituitary secretions play a part in diabetes.

The Coris were not the first husband-&-wife team so honored (former prizewinners: Radium Discoverers Pierre and Marie Curie, Chemists Frederic Joliot and Irene Curie-Joliot). Carl, 50, and Gerty Cori, 51, both born in what used to be Austria-Hungary, met as medical students in the same class at the University of Prague, soon afterward were married and teamed up in a lifetime study of the mysterious chemistry of the human body. Their work may some day lead to a cure for diabetes (TIME, May 12). At Washington

University since 1931, they have patiently traced the body's step-by-step transformation of carbohydrates and sugars into substances in blood and tissue. Their Nobel Prize was for discovering and synthesizing a complicated enzyme (an enzyme is a biological catalyst) that begins the process of converting glycogen (animal starch) into sugar in the body.

Recently the Cori studies merged with those of Houssay. Following up Houssay's discovery that the pituitary is involved in diabetes, the Coris found that a mysterious substance in a pituitary extract seems to regulate the body's absorption of sugar.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.