Salome Waelsch, 100, German Refugee and Geneticist

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Salome Waelsch, who died November 7 at 100, was a biologist who escaped Hitler’s Germany and made fundamental contributions to the study of genes and embryos at a time when women were not so welcome in the lab.

As chairman of Yeshiva University’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine genetics department, she taught some of the first courses on medical genetics in America. In 1993, when she was 88 and still head of Molecular Genetics at Einstein, she was awarded the National Medal of Science. She maintained her mouse colony into her mid-90s.

Born in Danzig, Germany, Waelsch was raised a Zionist. Her father died in the 1918 influenza epidemic, and her mother saw her inheritance disappear in the post-WWI inflation. Educated at the universities of Konigsberg, Berlin, and Freiburg, she at first studied classical languages but switched to biology at the suggestion of a friend. “That was the beginning,” she told Newsday in 1993. “I found my love.”

She did her graduate work at Freiburg under the developmental biologist, and later Nobelist, Hans Spemann, whom she considered anti-woman. “Our first meeting made it quite clear that we were not meant for each other, but I suppose Spemann did not have enough courage to turn me down outright,” she told the author of “A Conceptual History of Developmental Genetics.” Waelsch managed to get some training in genetics with Spemann’s assistants even though Spemann had little interest in the topic.

With a Ph.D. in hand in 1932, and despite the twin impediments of being a Jew and a woman, she gained an appointment at the University of Berlin. There she married a young biochemist, Rudolf Schoenheimer. As Hitler and the Nazi government made life increasingly untenable, including firing Jewish academics, the couple fled Germany for New York, where Schoenheimer was offered a position at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. The similarly qualified Waelsch was not offered employment.

In Germany, she told the New York Times in 1993, she had been told, “You are a Jew and a woman, forget it.” In New York, it was just, “You are a woman, so forget it.” But within a couple of years she found a research position — initially unpaid — in the laboratory of the Columbia geneticist L.C. (Leslie) Dunn, known informally as the “mouse house” for its huge population of test animals.

When Waelsch began her research, it was not widely accepted that genes were involved in embryonic development. Waelsch helped establish that they were. Her work, spanning over a half-century, involved the development and differentiation of cell types and body parts within mouse embryos, and the genetic switches that control their timing. Her work had important implications for the study of birth defects. One paper from 1939 detailed how genes control the inheritance of taillessness in mice. She published over 100 papers in all. In addition to the National Medal of Science, she was also elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1979 and made a fellow of the Royal Society of the United Kingdom in 1995.

In 1955, after concluding that she would never have a permanent position at Columbia, Waelsch was appointed associate professor of anatomy at the newly founded Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Her husband died in 1941, and two years later she married another Columbia biochemist, Heinrich Waelsch. He died in 1966.

In 1982, the 50th anniversary of her Ph.D., she was offered she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Freiberg. But she refused to travel to Germany to accept the award. Her letter was read at the ceremony: “My feeling of appreciation and gratefulness … are tempered by feelings of bitterness. I cannot accept the recognition of this anniversary … without remembering the Holocaust.”

Waelsch became university professor emeritus in 1978, but continued her research. “I love mice,” she told Newsday in 1993, adding that she loathed rats. “I’m going to drop dead in the mouse room. That is my wish.”

Salome Gluecksohn Waelsch

Born October 6, 1907, in Danzig, Germany; died November 7 at her home in Morningside Heights; survived by a son, a daughter, three grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.


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