Why the World's Best Scientists Choose Salk: Stories From the People Who Built Something Different

Why It Matters

The Salk model illustrates how institutional design — academic freedom, interdisciplinary interaction, and encouragement of risk-taking — can accelerate discovery and attract top talent, offering a blueprint for organizations seeking breakthrough science.

Summary

Researchers in the video credit the Salk Institute’s unconventional culture — founded by Jonas Salk and populated by figures like Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel — for enabling major scientific leaps. Scientists describe an environment that prizes intellectual curiosity, cross-disciplinary freedom, small collaborative labs, and a tolerance for pursuing novel or seemingly odd ideas. Personal anecdotes show hires were valued for who they were rather than for narrow specialties, allowing investigators to switch fields and chase unexpected results. Those conditions, speakers say, produced intensive collaboration and an outsized output of influential papers in the Institute’s early years.

Original Description

What does it take to do science that actually matters—and why do so many exceptional researchers spend their entire careers in one place?

In this video, created to kick off the Salk Institute's inaugural Faculty Think Tank event on May 21, 2026, some of the Institute's longest-serving scientists share what drew them here and what has kept them. Gerald Joyce, Tony Hunter, Catherine Rivier, Greg Lemke, and the late Joanne Chory reflect on a place that was designed, from the very beginning, to work differently.

Salk has no academic departments, so there are no silos. Scientists from neuroscience, cancer biology, immunology, plant science, and computational biology share hallways, ideas, and questions. That's Jonas Salk's founding principle. He believed that the most important discoveries happen at the edges of disciplines, when people with very different expertise start asking the same question together.

The scientists in this video have watched that culture hold across decades, and they speak to it from experience. Learn about:

- Why scientists with options chose Salk over universities and other research institutes

- How the Institute's open, non-departmental structure enables unexpected collaboration

- What it feels like to spend a career asking foundational questions — and why that matters

The Salk Institute for Biological Studies is an independent, nonprofit research institute in La Jolla, California. Founded in 1960 by polio vaccine developer Jonas Salk, the Institute is dedicated to foundational science—the kind that asks the first questions, long before a drug or therapy exists, and makes every future breakthrough possible.

Learn more at salk.edu.

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