“A woman and a Jew? Forget it!”: The story of Salome Gluecksohn-Waelsch

Sep 10

Sep 10 “A woman and a Jew? Forget it!”: The story of Salome Gluecksohn-Waelsch

100 Ideas, History of genetics, Women in genetics, Developmental genetics

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Salome Gluecksohn was born in 1907, just a few years after Hilde, in what is now Gdansk in Poland, but was then part of the German empire. She was educated in Greek, Latin, and the humanities, but had virtually no education in science until she arrived at university and decided to intellectually explore.

As a woman and a Jew in early 20th century Germany, Salome became accustomed to fighting her way through her education against a wave of prejudice from her classmates and teachers. But strong-willed Salome didn't let any of that nonsense stop her.

By her own admission, she was never actually planning to be a scientist. She wanted to be a teacher, and thought that biology might offer a practical route into the profession, so she worked her way through university by earning a living as a private tutor for a wealthy family in Berlin.

She must have made quite an impression on her young charge, as the family asked if she would consider moving to a smaller town with them, even asking for her input as to where they might go. Aware of the exciting work in developmental biology at Hans Spemann’s laboratory, Salome suggested Freiburg. The charms of this attractive university town in southwest Germany clearly appealed to her employers, and they moved there in 1928.

Salome described the atmosphere at Spemann’s laboratory as “stimulating to the utmost” but “negative in essence.” She was later outspoken about Spemann, accusing him of being an anti-Semite and anti-feminist, and holding up examples of his behaviour towards her fellow female students, including Hilde Mangold.

“He was a strong German nationalist, full of mistrust towards other nationalities and sharing the prejudices of his fellow nationals,” she said. “I already mentioned his prejudice against women expressed also in his dealings with Hilde... the discoverer of the ‘organiser’ who is reported not to have appreciated it when Spemann added his name to the publication of her thesis while other male students were permitted to publish their work alone.”

She also pointed out that the work behind Spemann’s discovery that even dead organiser cells can conduct the tissues around them - the phenomenon known as embryonic induction - was done by a female graduate student, Else Wehmeier.

“I was around at that time. Her name did not even appear on the first publication reporting this exciting result!” Gluecksohn said.

Salome felt that Spemann's disapproval of women and Jews led him to assign her a tedious and menial thesis project, observing and describing the development of limbs in newts. She suspected that the work was intended to form the background information for a far more exciting project for a (presumably male) student at a later date.

But her critique of Spemann went beyond his prejudices. She, and several other students, criticised the man in charge for keeping his research focus too narrow and ignoring the role of the emerging field of genetics in embryo development.

Luckily, Salome was assigned the more forward-thinking Viktor Hamburger, Hilde Mangold’s friend, as her advisor. Hamburger arranged joint seminars with other departments and made sure the students, including Salome, received at least some education in this exciting new area of science.

Salome may have resented her project, but worked with skill and discipline, completing her PhD in 1932, just as Hitler rose to power. She looked for a postdoctoral position but was repeatedly turned away, with one potential employer telling her flatly, "You, a woman and a Jew? Forget it!"

In 1933, new laws in Germany prevented Jews from working as civil servants, which included posts as university teachers and professors. Salome and her new husband, Rudolph Schoenheimer, fled to New York, where Rudi got a position at Columbia University.

Six months later, Salome met Columbia mouse geneticist Leslie Clarence Dunn at a dinner party. He was intrigued by her scientific background and invited her to work in his laboratory. Although Dunn had no money to pay her a salary, Salome agreed and spent three years working for him for free before being appointed as a research assistant.

At this time, the field of developmental genetics was just beginning to take shape. And, unlike Spemann, Dunn considered genetics to be of the utmost importance to development.

In Dunn's laboratory, Salome studied the development of mice. Unlike amphibian embryos, scientists at the time were unable to use transplantation, isolation, or cell staining techniques to study mammalian embryos. So Salome used naturally occurring genetic mutations as natural versions of the embryonic manipulations conducted by Spemann, Mangold and their contemporaries.

Salome studied how genetic mutations in a region of the genome called the t-complex affected embryonic development, resulting in mice with spine and tail malformations. Descriptive studies of the development of mutant phenotypes required exquisite attention to detail. Luckily, she had been well trained in detailed observation, thanks to her work in Spemann’s laboratory.

Salome conducted a series of breeding experiments discovering and describing phenotypes and inheritance patterns, looking at the interaction between different versions or alleles of the t-complex, and describing their influence on development. Her first paper from her time in Dunn’s lab is regarded as one of the pivotal publications in sparking the new field of developmental genetics, and some credit Dunn and Glueckson-Waelsch with effectively founding the entire field.

Despite this success, Salome spent the next 17 years in Dunn’s laboratory poorly paid and under-recognised. She dreamed of her own lab, but Dunn wasn’t interested in advancing her career, and there were no regular faculty posts for women at the university.

By the 1950s, Salome’s first husband had died. She had remarried a man named Heini Waelsch, and the pair had two children. With her family life now firmly settled in New York, she felt tied to the city, but there were even fewer opportunities for her to work outside Columbia than there were chances for progression inside. So she was stuck there with little chance of advancing her career.

Her break finally came in 1955, when Heini encouraged her to look for opportunities at the new Albert Einstein College of Medicine that had just been established by the private Jewish Yeshiva University in New York. Fortunately the head of the anatomy department, Ernst Scharrer, was committed to promoting women in science, and was quick to realise what Salome could offer.

Starting as an associate professor, she advanced to professor shortly afterward, and in 1963 helped establish the College’s new Department of Genetics. Salome achieved the dream of running her own lab, but she never employed more than a few people, trusted few of her employees, and reportedly ran her group with an iron hand.

Unlike Hilde Mangold, Salome lived a long and productive life, co-authoring over 100 publications on developmental genetics and collecting many awards for her scientific work including receiving the National Medal of Science in 1993, becoming an overseas member of the Royal Society in 1995, and receiving the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal in 1999.

Reportedly, Dwight Eisenhower, who was president of Columbia University before he became president of the US, asked Salome to speak to him about her research, and she gave him what she described as an elementary introduction to the field. He was so impressed that he thought she deserved to live somewhere better than her tiny New York apartment and gifted her a magnificent Columbia-owned residence - a potent example of the power of effective science communication!

Gluekcsohn-Waelsch officially retired in 1978 but continued actively researching and participating in scientific conferences into the 1990s, finally passing away in 2007 at the age of 100.

After she died, the eminent mouse geneticist Professor Lee Silver wrote in a tribute in Nature Genetics:

“She was a remarkable woman who persevered against Nazi anti-Semitism and Ivy League sexism to establish the new scientific field of developmental genetics. Her career was driven by an early insight into the fundamental connection between genes and development—a connection that eluded the leading geneticists and embryologists of her time, who seem not to have ventured intellectually beyond their narrow spheres of research.”

Life is amazing and mysterious - unfolding from a string of genetic code in a single cell to make all the tissues of the body - but we can say thank you to Hilde Mangold and Salome Gluecksohn-Waelsch for helping us to understand a little bit more about how it all works.

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