National Library of Medicine, Images from the History of Medicine, B05353 · Public domain

Cori and her husband Carl worked side by side for decades studying how the body breaks down and stores energy, despite institutions that were happy to employ him and reluctant to pay or credit her for the same research. Their joint discovery of the Cori cycle — how glycogen is converted to lactic acid in muscle and resynthesized by the liver — won them, together with Bernardo Houssay, the 1947 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, making her the first woman to win that prize and only the third woman to win any Nobel in science.