Gerty Theresa Radnitz was born in Prague, then part of Austria-Hungary, into a Jewish family.
Gerty Theresa Radnitz was born on August 15, 1896, in Prague, at the time a city within the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now the capital of the Czech Republic. She was the eldest of three daughters born to Otto Radnitz, a chemist who managed sugar refineries, and Martha Neustadt Radnitz.
Growing up in a middle-class Jewish family, Gerty was initially educated at home by a governess before attending a private school for girls, where the curriculum emphasized subjects deemed suitable for young women of the era rather than the sciences. Her uncle, a professor of pediatrics, sparked her early interest in medicine and science, an interest she pursued despite the significant barriers facing women seeking higher education in early twentieth-century Central Europe.
At age 16, Gerty made the ambitious decision to prepare for the entrance examinations to medical school, requiring her to cram eight years of Latin, science, and mathematics into a single year of intensive study at a Gymnasium. She passed the exams in 1914 and enrolled at the German Karl-Ferdinand University in Prague's medical school, one of relatively few women in her cohort. This early determination and academic discipline would define her entire scientific career, culminating decades later in her groundbreaking work on carbohydrate metabolism.
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