Two teak-accented buildings enclosed a marble courtyard, amid orange trees, terraced pools and a grand ocean view. On her first day, as Jones made her way through the Salk’s campus to meet with the president, she was dazzled by its grandeur. The other was Emerson, who was still en route, driving cross-country with her mother, writing grant applications by the light of motel signs. She was one of two new hires for the Salk’s regulatory biology department. Jones started at the Institute on July 1, 1986, when she was 31. This state of affairs wasn’t unique to the Salk: Women make up a similar share of senior faculty at similar research institutions, and just 28 percent of tenured biology professors at elite public universities. It was Kathy Jones, another professor, who sent around an email letting colleagues know Emerson was leaving, and thanking her for her years of service.Īt the time, women made up just 16 percent of the Salk’s senior faculty and 32 percent of assistant professors - a striking statistic, given that the biological sciences are one of the only scientific fields in which women earn more than half the doctoral degrees. The Salk made no announcement of her departure. On her final day, she took one last look around she had spent 40 years going to a lab almost every day, and couldn’t imagine a life without one. She knew it was over.Įmerson broke the news to her lab employees and turned to the work of shutting down experiments. “You and I have had long careers,” Emerson remembers Blackburn saying. Instead, she found Blackburn flanked by the Salk’s chief finance and science officers. So when she went to meet with Blackburn that fall, she thought it might be about their progress. She didn’t.Įmerson had pinned her hopes on a new funding initiative she was developing with the Salk’s president, Elizabeth Blackburn. To renew it, the Institute required that she have enough grant money to cover half her salary. She was, at the time, onto an exciting idea - a novel approach to understanding tumor growth - but her 66th birthday was coming up, and with it her contract with Salk would expire. In a 1960 letter, Watson called the idea “Jonas’s utopia.”īy 2017, the biochemist Beverly Emerson had worked in this utopia for 31 years. He recruited 10 of the top men in biology to join him, including Francis Crick, newly famous for discovering, with James Watson, DNA’s double helix.
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He envisioned it as a place where scientists would work in open, collaborative laboratories, free from university bureaucracies: They would be professors, supervising graduate students and postdocs, but with no teaching requirements. Jonas Salk founded the institution in 1963 as a kind of second legacy, after the millions of lives saved with his polio vaccine.
But the Salk Institute for Biological Research, perched on a cliff above the Pacific Ocean in La Jolla, is distinguished even among its neighbors. Northern San Diego County is a scientific mecca, home to some of the world’s leading biotech companies, renowned research institutions and a world-class university.
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