Women at the Salk Institute say they faced a culture of marginalization and hostility

‘I Want What My Male Colleague Has, and That Will Cost a Few Million Dollars’

Women at the Salk Institute say they faced a culture of marginalization and hostility. The numbers from other elite scientific institutions suggest they’re not alone.

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. But the Salk Institute for Biological Research, perched on a cliff above the Pacific Ocean in La Jolla, is distinguished even among its neighbors. Jonas Salk founded the institution in 1963 as a kind of second legacy, after the millions of lives saved with his polio vaccine. 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. 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. In a 1960 letter, Watson called the idea “Jonas’s utopia.”

By 2017, the biochemist Beverly Emerson had worked in this utopia for 31 years. 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. To renew it, the Institute required that she have enough grant money to cover half her salary. She didn’t.

Emerson had pinned her hopes on a new funding initiative she was developing with the Salk’s president, Elizabeth Blackburn. So when she went to meet with Blackburn that fall, she thought it might be about their progress. Instead, she found Blackburn flanked by the Salk’s chief finance and science officers. “You and I have had long careers,” Emerson remembers Blackburn saying. She knew it was over.

Emerson broke the news to her lab employees and turned to the work of shutting down experiments. 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. The Salk made no announcement of her departure. 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...