The future starts upstream Foundational discoveries are the source of tomorrow’s breakthroughs, but what happens if we let the river run dry?

The urgency is understandable. Federal funders, investors, and philanthropists all want to be sure that their support will yield tangible results in the near future.

Yet many of today’s top therapies trace their lineage back to discoveries made decades earlier by scientists who had the opportunity and support to ask big, open-ended questions. Rosen says the same opportunities are not being afforded to today’s scientists.

“Everyone’s trying to plant tulips they can see bloom in three months,” Rosen says. “But the science that gives rise to real innovation and cures often takes decades of deep, risky, long-term work. And fewer and fewer people are doing it.”

President Joyce also speaks from experience, having previously directed the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (GNF).

“What pharmaceutical companies do is very important, but that applied research is very different from the foundational research being done at a place like Salk,” says Joyce. “A company’s experiments are designed to provide more immediate results, and projects that aren’t progressing fast enough will be shut down. This is a reasonable stance for a commercial organization that cannot undertake risky, early-stage projects that may only yield returns after a decade or more. These long-term opportunities are what nonprofit science is for.”

Rosen says pharmaceutical companies are also increasingly relying on smaller biotech companies and startups to do much of the initial research and development. These groups take on the risky business of early-stage drug discovery and development, with larger corporations often acquiring them once a promising product is in sight.

These days, though, even nonindustry scientists are shifting toward safer, short-term bets. In the past, an academic researcher trying to understand which genes and molecules drive a biological process might not have known what the future impact of their findings would be. Today, the same scientist is expected to outline the clinical applications of their experiments before they can get the money to do them. With federal funding cuts making the grant process even more competitive, researchers have no choice but to tailor their experiments to funders’ preferences.

“Academic scientists are being pushed to act like drug companies, but with a tiny fraction of the resources,” says Rosen. “How many institutions have set up high-throughput screening and drug discovery programs to attract translational funding? We shouldn’t expect academics to do the same work as industry scientists. The faculty at Salk are extremely brilliant and creative scientists, and when they’re given the opportunity and freedom to do what they do best, we all benefit.”

SINCE ITS FOUNDING, SALK HAS MAINTAINED A SPECIAL PLACE IN THE SCIENCE ECOSYSTEM. As an independent, nonprofit, basic research institute, it is uniquely designed to support the kind of foundational discoveries the other sectors rely on.

The Institute’s scale has been intentionally optimized: small enough to allow close collaborative relationships, but large enough to cover a breadth of research areas. Faculty are unified by big questions, not separated by departments. With fewer academic responsibilities and a dedicated administrative staff to support operational tasks, Salk scientists can focus more of their energy on their research, interacting with colleagues, and generating new ideas.

“The collaborative culture and sheer diversity of science at Salk make a real difference,” says Chief Science Officer Jan Karlseder, PhD. “When people with completely different expertise work on the same problem, that’s when real breakthroughs happen.”

Karlseder says Salk is a leader in “use-inspired basic research”—foundational science that isn’t necessarily pursued for its immediate application but still has clear implications for health and disease. The Institute’s academic governance committees work to identify the most promising research areas and strategically recruit scientists who are at the forefront of those fields.

“We think very hard about what the most important questions in biology are and what teams we can assemble to make the biggest impact,” Karlseder says. “The right people asking the right question is what unlocks entirely new fields.”

Take Salk molecular biologist Tony Hunter, PhD. When he joined the Institute’s faculty in 1975, he set out to learn how viruses turn healthy cells into cancer cells. This research led to his discovery of tyrosine phosphorylation, a molecular switch that controls cell growth and division. Hunter’s later work also explained how the enzymes that drive this switch, called tyrosine kinases, become overactive in cancer and lead to tumor growth.

At the time, these were basic insights into cellular biology. But with the help of translational, clinical, and pharmaceutical partners, they led to the approval of over 80 different cancer-fighting drugs, including the 2001 debut of Novartis’ Gleevec, a groundbreaking medicine that targets tyrosine kinases.

Hunter’s research didn’t start as a drug discovery project. He was asking a fundamental question about how biology works. But the answer completely changed the way we treat cancer and saved millions of lives.

“We want the public to understand that foundational science isn’t separate from translation—it’s married to it,” says Karlseder. “Every advance in translational science begins with someone asking a fundamental question. We’re still the place that asks those questions first.”

Salk scientists are now answering questions that are changing the way we think about cancer, aging, Alzheimer’s, allergies, agriculture, and more.

When there’s a clear opportunity to translate these discoveries, the Institute doesn’t shy away from kick-starting that process. But its core mission is to push the boundaries of what is known and use those insights to move science and society forward.

“Salk has always been what science needs most at each moment in history,” says Karlseder. “Biology used to be about taking things apart and figuring out what they’re made of. Now it’s about putting them back together and understanding how they make us who we are. The great questions ahead are integrative, and that’s exactly what Salk was built to do.”