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.

[2][3] Salome started to quietly disagree with Spemann as him and his peers believed adamantly that there was no overlap in genetics and embryonic development.

[2] She left Columbia University in 1953 to commence a professorship in anatomy at the newly founded Albert Einstein College of Medicine (AECOM), where she became a full professor in 1958 and held the chair of molecular genetics from 1963 to 1976.

[4] Gluecksohn-Waelsch worked on the genetics of differentiation, the process by which unspecified cells from a fertilized egg adopt their various specific fates in development.

She became an overseas member of the Royal Society in 1995[10] and was awarded the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal for "a lifetime contribution to the science of genetics" in 1999.

In 2010, the Freiburg-based Spemann Graduate School of Biology and Medicine (SGBM) and the AECOM Department of Genetics introduced the Salome Gluecksohn-Waelsch Prize for the best dissertation.