October 6: The Mother of Developmental Genetics

Salome Gluecksohn-Waelsch, a refugee from Nazi Germany whose research into mouse embryology gave rise to the field of developmental genetics, was born in Danzig on this date in 1906. Waelsch obtained her doctorate in embryology at the University of Freiberg in 1932, but fled her homeland with her biologist husband Rudolf Schoenheimer when the Nazis rose to power the following year. At Columbia University, she worked as an unpaid assistant (thanks to institutional sexism) with a small team of scientists to examine the influence of naturally occurring genetic mutations in mice born without tails and with other abnormalities. Papers that they published in the 1940s and ’50s established the link between genetic mutation and inherited defects during the period of cell differentiation. In 1955, she joined the faculty of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University, where she continued to conduct research for more than fifty years, making fundamental discoveries about the functioning of genes, including their role in cancer. Waelsch, who lived to 100, was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1996. Both Columbia and the University of Freiberg awarded her honorary doctorates; she accepted the latter in absentia, writing, “I regret the tendency to forget and deny the tremendous human and political upheavals of the past half-century and to celebrate anniversaries as though nothing had happened. To give expression to this regret is my duty towards all of those who suffered under the Nazi regime.”
“I had to fight on the street against the children who ran after me and sang dirty anti-Semitic songs. I grew up fighting.” —Salome Gluecksohn-Waelsch