A childhood of loss in Danzig
Salome Gluecksohn was born on October 6, 1907, in Danzig, then part of Germany and now Gdańsk in Poland, to Ilya and Nadia Gluecksohn. Her childhood was marked by one blow after another. Her father died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, when she was ten. The family’s money vanished in the ruinous inflation that followed the First World War. And as a Jewish girl she faced open hostility. “I had to fight on the street against the children who ran after me and sang dirty antisemitic songs,” she later said in an interview. “I grew up fighting.”
She first meant to study classics. But she was a Zionist, and, as the Jewish Women’s Archive records, she switched to biology because she thought it would be more practical in Palestine. She studied chemistry and zoology at the universities of Königsberg and Berlin before moving to Freiburg in 1928.
In Spemann’s laboratory
At the University of Freiburg she joined the laboratory of Hans Spemann, the embryologist who would win the Nobel Prize in 1935 for discovering how one part of an amphibian embryo directs the development of its neighbours. For her doctorate she studied how limbs develop in aquatic salamanders, and she received her Ph.D. in 1932.
The training was superb, but the atmosphere was not. She later commented on Spemann’s nationalism and on prejudice against women scientists. Spemann and his colleagues were also adamant that genetics had nothing to tell embryology: in their view, genes explained the differences between individuals, not how an egg becomes a body. She came to disagree, after talking with leading geneticists and reading their work, but as her obituary in Nature Genetics put it, she knew it was unwise for a student to contradict the Herr Professor, so she waited until she had her own laboratory. Meanwhile, one potential employer summed up her prospects in Germany bluntly: “You, a woman and a Jew, forget it.”
Escape to New York
In 1932 she found work as a research assistant at the University of Berlin, and that year she married a brilliant young biochemist, Rudolf Schoenheimer. Within months Hitler came to power and ordered Jewish academics dismissed. Unlike many German Jewish intellectuals, she was convinced things would only get worse. In 1933 the couple fled to New York, where Schoenheimer had been offered a position at Columbia University.
Columbia’s policies would not allow her a faculty post. She began as an unpaid laboratory assistant to the neurobiologist Samuel Detwiler, then moved to the laboratory of the geneticist Leslie C. Dunn, who was breeding mice carrying mutations at a site called the T locus. It was the perfect match: Dunn had the genetics, she had the embryology. She stayed with him as a research associate for seventeen years, never offered the professorship her work deserved, and for a time also worked with her friend the biochemist Sarah Ratner in Columbia’s department of obstetrics and gynecology. She became an American citizen in 1938. In 1941 Schoenheimer died by suicide. In 1943 she married the neurochemist Heinrich Waelsch, and they had two children, Naomi and Peter.
Founding a new science
Her question was simple to state and enormously hard to answer: how does a single fertilised egg produce a whole mammal, with hundreds of kinds of cells arranged in perfect order? Until the 1930s, genetics and embryology approached this from opposite sides and barely spoke to each other. Gluecksohn-Waelsch brought them together. She took mice with inherited defects and, instead of simply recording the abnormal adults, used the methods of embryology to trace exactly when and where in the developing embryo each faulty gene first did its damage.
In 1938 she published her first paper on the genes that shape the mouse embryo, “The Development of Two Tailless Mutants in the House Mouse,” in the journal Genetics. Her work on mutations in the gene now called Brachyury showed that they disrupted the development of the rear part of the embryo, and she traced their effects to the notochord, a rod of tissue that organises the body’s main axis. She showed that the product of the T locus was involved in forming mesoderm, the embryonic layer that gives rise to muscle, bone and blood, and in building the body axis.
This was the birth of mammalian developmental genetics: the study of how genes direct development. Because she combined Spemann’s embryology with classical mouse genetics, she is widely regarded as its founder. Over six decades she co-authored more than one hundred papers.
A home at Einstein
In 1955 the biologists Ernst and Berta Scharrer, who were building the faculty of the newly founded Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, recruited her to the school, which the Jewish Women’s Archive describes as a place where competent Jewish women were welcome. She became a full professor in 1958 and from 1963 led its department of genetics, which she chaired until 1976.
There her research moved from anatomy to biochemistry. From 1968 she collaborated with the Nobel laureate Carl Cori on mice carrying radiation-induced deletions near the albino gene on chromosome 7. Animals inheriting two copies of these deletions died soon after birth, and in 1968 she, Robert Erickson and Cori showed that they lacked the liver enzyme glucose-6-phosphatase. Over the next two decades her laboratory used these mice to show that missing stretches of one chromosome could switch off the normal maturation of liver cells, affecting enzymes encoded on other chromosomes. It was evidence for regulatory genes that control whole sets of other genes during development. Her curiosity ranged widely: with the geneticist M. S. Deol she used mutant mice to study the role of the inner hair cells of the ear in hearing, published in Nature in 1979, and in 1992, at the age of 84, she was still publishing reviews of the field she had founded. One gene later found within the deletions, FAH, is the gene that causes the human liver disease tyrosinemia type I when it is mutated.
Why it matters
Developmental genetics is now one of the foundations of biology and medicine. It explains how genes build organs and limbs, why mutations cause birth defects, and how the same developmental genes can go wrong in cancer. The mouse, the animal she made into a model for studying genes and development, is today one of the leading models for studying human inherited disease, and the gene-by-gene, embryo-by-embryo approach she pioneered is how researchers still trace the origins of congenital conditions.
Her work also showed the value of patience in basic research. The tailless mice she studied in the 1930s, long before anyone knew what a gene was made of, pointed to a gene, Brachyury, that molecular biologists would later isolate and study in detail. The National Science Foundation’s citation for her National Medal of Science honoured her “lifetime of work on developmental genetics, providing a large body of knowledge on the study of mammalian genetics.”
A Jewish scientist’s path
Her Jewish identity shaped every turn of her life. Antisemitism marked her childhood; Nazi persecution ended her German career and drove her into exile; and in America, discrimination against women, and in that era against Jews, kept her from a faculty post for nearly twenty years. Her early Zionism had first steered her to biology. She found her professional home at a medical school founded under Jewish auspices, Einstein, where she was welcomed.
When the University of Freiburg offered her a gold doctoral diploma in 1982, a traditional honour for alumni fifty years after their degrees, the Jewish Women’s Archive records that memories of the Holocaust led her to decline it. Above her desk at Einstein she kept photographs of Albert Einstein and the playwright Lillian Hellman.
Honours late in life
Recognition came late but abundantly. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1979 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1980. In 1993 President Bill Clinton presented her with the National Medal of Science at the White House. She became a foreign member of the Royal Society in 1995, and in 1999 the Genetics Society of America awarded her its Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal for a lifetime contribution to the science of genetics. Columbia University, which had refused her a faculty post, gave her an honorary degree.
She formally retired in 1978 but kept working in her laboratory for many more years, publishing and attending scientific meetings into the 1990s. Heinrich Waelsch had died in 1966.
A century of science
Salome Gluecksohn-Waelsch died in New York City on November 7, 2007, a month after her hundredth birthday. In 2010 the Spemann Graduate School of Biology and Medicine in Freiburg, named after the professor who had dismissed genetics, joined Einstein’s genetics department to create the Salome Gluecksohn-Waelsch Prize for the best dissertation.
The Jewish Women’s Archive calls her a model for those who wish to combine excellent science with freedom of the spirit, humour and family. She trained two generations of developmental biologists, and the field she founded, the meeting of genes and embryos, is now one of the central ways medicine understands how a human body is built and what happens when that process goes wrong.
Sources & further reading
Salome Gluecksohn Waelsch, Jewish Women’s Archive Encyclopedia · Salome Gluecksohn-Waelsch, Wikipedia · Salome G. Waelsch, National Medal of Science recipient, U.S. National Science Foundation · Lee Silver, Salome Gluecksohn-Waelsch 1907–2007, Nature Genetics 40, 376 (2008) · Erickson RP, Gluecksohn-Waelsch S, Cori CF. Glucose-6-phosphatase deficiency caused by radiation-induced alleles at the albino locus in the mouse. PNAS 1968 (PubMed) · Gluecksohn-Waelsch S, DeFranco D. Lethal chromosomal deletions in the mouse. BioEssays 1991 (PubMed) · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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