The Salk Institute, the storied biomedical research center in San Diego, is leaning hard into artificial intelligence to power its life sciences work — even as federal research funding faces new pressures.
In an interview with Endpoints News, Salk president Gerald Joyce described a moment of turbulence for US research centers, set against the calmer backdrop of his office view of hang gliders drifting over the Pacific. According to Endpoints, Joyce spoke about cuts to funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the institute's decision to go "all in" on AI, and its framing of what he calls the "Year of the Brain."
The pairing of those themes is the heart of the story. The NIH is the single largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, and independent institutes like Salk depend heavily on its grants. When that money tightens, research leaders are forced to make hard choices about where to place their bets. Joyce's answer, per Endpoints, is to wager on AI as a way to accelerate discovery — including in neuroscience, the focus of the institute's "Year of the Brain."
Salk is not a household name, but it carries outsized weight in science: it was founded by polio-vaccine pioneer Jonas Salk and has long been a hub for fundamental biology. A commitment from its president to reorganize around AI is a signal of where elite research may be heading.
Why it matters: how a flagship institute like Salk navigates shrinking federal support while betting on AI offers an early read on whether artificial intelligence can help American science do more with less — or whether funding cuts will simply mean less discovery.