Gerty Radnitz was born in the Czech capital of Prague and graduated from the Medical School there in 1920, the year in which she married her lifelong collaborator Carl Cori. She moved with him to America, taking a post in 1922 at the New York State Institute for the Study of Malignant Diseases in Buffalo. In 1931 she went with her husband to the Washington University Medical School, where she became professor of biochemistry in 1947.

In 1947 the Coris and Bernardo Houssay shared the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for their discovery of how glycogen is broken down and resynthesized in the body.