Salome Gluecksohn-Waelsch

Salome Gluecksohn-Waelsch (October 6, 1907 – November 7, 2007) was a German-born U.S. geneticist and co-founder of the field of developmental genetics, which investigates the genetic mechanisms of development.

Gluecksohn-Waelsch was born in Danzig, Germany to Nadia and Ilya Gluecksohn. She grew up in Germany between World War I and II, where her family faced hardships including her father's death in the 1918 influenza epidemic, severe post-war inflation, and intense anti-Semitic sentiment.

She studied chemistry and zoology in Königsberg and Berlin before she joined Spemann's laboratory at the University of Freiburg in 1928. She commented on both Spemann's nationalist tendencies and prejudice against women scientists; prejudices she faced as a Jewish woman limited her career options in Germany. In 1932 she received her doctorate for her work on the embryological limb development of aquatic salamanders. In the same year she married the biochemist Rudolph Schönheimer, with whom she escaped from Nazi Germany in 1933.

She went on to become a lecturer at Columbia University in 1936, bringing embryological acumen to Leslie C. Dunn's genetics laboratory, where she remained for 17 years. Gluecksohn-Waelsch attempted to find mutations that affected early development and discover the processes that these genes affected.

In 1938, she acquired US citizenship, and after Schönheimer´s death in 1941 she married the neurochemist Heinrich Waelsch in 1943, with whom she had two children.

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