Genesis of the Salk Institute: The Epic of Its Founders by Suzanne Bourgeois (review)

The Salk Institute for Biological Studies sits on the edge of a seaside bluff in La Jolla, California, its fellows’ studies angled toward a sunset view over the ocean. It is an evocative, poetic location, enhanced by the austere but composed forms of architect Louis Kahn’s masterpiece. Tourists from around the world travel to see the building and the site, but, as Suzanne Bourgeois notes, the building is just the shell that contains extraordinary scientific, social, and cultural developments that have made the Institute one of the world’s most important research centers.

Jonas Salk represented the ultimate vision of the humane scientist when the success of his vaccine against polio was announced in 1955. But behind the public adoration lay other scientists’ resentment. Many saw the rushed publicity surrounding the vaccine as unseemly. Salk’s newfound celebrity, however, enabled greater ambitions, and he envisioned a community of scientists, scholars, and philosophers, freed from traditional constraints of academic production, that could focus on other large questions. Planned as an extension to his work at Pitt, the institute settled in La Jolla after a mix of coincidence and luck—Salk had favored Palo Alto, but was swayed by plans for a new University of California campus north of San Diego and by General Atomics’ newly constructed research laboratories. Despite a lack of funds, astonishing political naïveté, and internal turmoil, the institute opened gradually throughout the late 1960s, although much of Kahn’s original scheme remained unbuilt, and the laboratories themselves were only half occupied well into the next decade.

Bourgeois was a witness to the Salk’s early days—a leading researcher of cellular regulation and genetics in the 1950s and 1960s, she knew many of the institute’s founding scientists, and became a junior member of the institute in 1969. Her book walks a careful line between memoir and history, offering diligent biographies of the founders and personal recollections that reveal internal struggles and the difficulties in building an organization with a vague agenda and few immediately apparent applications. She begins with a family tree showing how the Salk Institute’s founders were all intellectually related to one another and to major developments in twentieth-century science. Friendships, chance meetings, and collaborations all built the Salk’s true infrastructure—a network of scientists and intellectuals that joined Jonas Salk in a vision of a community that provided a forum for interdisciplinary work and discussion that would have been impossible in traditional academic environments. Dislocations caused by World War II played an important role in cross-fertilizing ideas and contacts, and Bourgeois’s life histories of many important institute figures show that the U.S. position as a safe haven for intellectual refugees nourished the growth of research and development during the 1950s. The focus on personalities allows Bourgeois to humanize the institute with anecdotes ranging from mirth to abject failure; from her warmly recalled stories it is apparent that the elite research done at the Salk was accompanied by a grand social life and, occasionally, by both hubris and regret.

Such personal histories, however, are submerged within a rather dry set of biographies and an archival recounting of the political and economic turmoil that beset the institute in the 1970s. This makes for uneven reading, but it also makes clear the book’s central dilemma, inevitable when a history is written by one of its participants. Genesis of the Salk Institute is neither pure memoir nor pure history, and as such the diligence of its biography is offset by personal opinion. Bourgeois’s characterization of institute president Frederic de Hoffmann—clearly the villain of the story—becomes personal (the chapter on his presidency is titled “A Napoleon from Byzantium”) and is not as well evidenced as her history of the early stages of the institute. De Hoffmann’s tenure was controversial; his management style and politics have been justly...