- Lived
- 1907–2007
- Field
- Developmental genetics
- From
- German-American
The story
In the early twentieth century two sciences studied how a fertilised egg becomes a body, and they barely spoke. Geneticists studied inherited differences between adults. Embryologists studied how groups of cells interact as an embryo forms, and many of them, including the great German embryologist Hans Spemann, insisted genes had nothing to do with it.
Salome Gluecksohn, born in Danzig in 1907, trained in Spemann’s Freiburg laboratory and earned her doctorate in 1932. She privately doubted his view but, as a student, kept quiet. A year later Hitler came to power and Jewish academics were dismissed. She fled to New York in 1933 with her husband, the biochemist Rudolf Schoenheimer.
Columbia University would not give her a faculty post, so she began as an unpaid assistant and then joined the geneticist Leslie C. Dunn, who was breeding mice with mutations at a site called the T locus. Gluecksohn-Waelsch did something new: rather than just describing the abnormal adult mice, she used embryological methods to find when and where in the developing embryo each faulty gene first acted. Her 1938 paper on two tailless mouse mutants began a series of studies showing that mutations in the gene now called Brachyury disrupted the rear of the embryo by affecting the notochord, the rod of tissue that organises the body axis.
Combining embryology with mouse genetics in this way created mammalian developmental genetics. Later, at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, she and Nobel laureate Carl Cori studied mice missing small pieces of chromosome 7 and showed that such deletions could disrupt the maturation of liver cells and the enzymes they make, evidence for genes that regulate other genes during development.
Today developmental genetics underlies how scientists and doctors understand the origins of birth defects, inherited diseases and some cancers, and the mouse she helped turn into a tool for studying development is now a leading model for studying human genetic disease. In 1993 she received the National Medal of Science for her lifetime of work on developmental genetics. She kept working in her laboratory long after retiring and died in 2007, a month after her hundredth birthday.
Why it matters
The field she founded is how medicine traces birth defects and inherited diseases to the genes that build the developing body.
About Salome Gluecksohn-Waelsch
Refugee scientist who joined embryology and genetics to found mammalian developmental genetics, showing how single genes steer the building of an embryo. National Medal of Science 1993.
Sources
- Salome Gluecksohn Waelsch Jewish Women’s Archive
- Salome Gluecksohn-Waelsch 1907–2007 Nature Genetics
- Salome G. Waelsch, National Medal of Science U.S. National Science Foundation
- Salome Gluecksohn-Waelsch Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.