Jonas Salk founded the Salk Institute in 1963

Person: Jonas Salk
Lived: 1914–1995
Field: Medicine
From: American

The story

After the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk could have rested on his fame. Instead he set out to build a new kind of research centre where scientists could investigate biology from the level of the cell to the level of society. He imagined a place where creative young researchers would want to work, saying he thought how nice it would be if such a place existed and he were invited to join it. He later described it as a kind of Socratic academy where science and the humanities could inspire each other.

In March 1960 Salk and the architect Louis Kahn asked the city of San Diego for a gift of land on the Torrey Pines Mesa, and a referendum that June approved it. With a $20 million grant from the National Science Foundation and support from the March of Dimes, which provided the initial funding, construction began in 1962, and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies opened in 1963 in La Jolla, California.

Kahn's design of concrete, light and two parallel laboratory blocks framing a water garden and a thin fountain that leads the eye to the Pacific became one of the most celebrated buildings of the century, often called his defining work. Salk wanted a beautiful campus to attract the best researchers in the world. Kahn even installed blackboards along the walkways so scientists could discuss ideas as they walked. The original buildings were designated a historical landmark in 1991.

The Salk Institute called its founding Salk's second triumph, and Salk himself said that the institute and what came out of it might in the end prove more significant than the vaccine. Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, was a leading professor there until his death in 2004, and other Nobel laureates have been associated with it, among them Renato Dulbecco, Robert Holley and Sydney Brenner.

Today the institute has about 850 researchers in 60 groups working in molecular biology and genetics, neuroscience and plant biology, on problems including ageing, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's disease and AIDS.