Carl Cori’s speech at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm, December 10, 1947

Your Royal Highnesses, your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen.

May I express my deep gratitude for the signal honor conferred upon me by the award of the Nobel Prize. To have thus been singled out among so many worthy scientists must evoke a feeling of humility and at the same time renew the determination to go on with the work.

That the award should have included my wife as well has been a source of deep satisfaction to me. Our collaboration began 30 years ago when we were still medical students at the University of Prague and has continued ever since. Our efforts have been largely complementary, and one without the other would not have gone as far as in combination.

While still very young we had the good fortune to go to the United States. Our adopted country has treated us with the utmost generosity and has been of great importance for our scientific development and our outlook on life.

It is our belief that art and science can best grow and develop in a society which cherishes freedom and which shows respect for the needs, the happiness and the dignity of human beings. My wife and I are proud to have been honored by a country that excels in all these qualities and we are happy to be guests in this beautiful and hospitable city.

Prior to the speech, Arne Tiselius, Vice-President of the Royal Academy of Sciences, made this comment: “Professor Carl Cori and Dr. Gerty Cori, United States, have had to travel a long way to join the ceremonies and this is to a still greater degree true of professor Bernardo Houssay from Argentine. We appreciate that this has not deterred them from personal participation. The intricate pattern of chemical reactions in the living cell, where everything appears to depend upon everything else, requires for its study an unusual intuition and a technical skill of which the Coris are masters. Professor Houssay from other aspects, studying the action of hormones, has reached results of the utmost importance for medicine, which when brought in relation to the results of his American colleagues, suddenly have opened up a new perspective of unexpected relationships between fundamental reactions in the living organism.”