How La Jolla Wins Hearts and Minds of Nobelists
The owner of Top o’ the Cove Restaurant along swank Prospect Street here says he knows when the high-powered science crowd is dining at his establishment.
The scientists don’t dress as flashily as the moneyed tourists. And their table conversation--even when it’s in English--is incomprehensible.
“They’re talking about things that nobody around them understands,” said owner Ron Zappardino. “I just figure it’s probably going to end up being the next Nobel Prize.”
Such is life in the San Diego beachfront community of La Jolla, where one of the nation’s premier resort areas and exclusive neighborhoods is also home to a string of world-famous scientific research institutions.
With the award last week of the 2001 Nobel Prize for chemistry to K. Barry Sharpless of Scripps Research Institute, there are now seven Nobel laureates who work along a few blocks of North Torrey Pines Road near the Torrey Pines Golf Course.
A dozen more laureates have lived or worked in La Jolla in the past, including the idiosyncratic Kary Mullis, winner of the 1993 prize for chemistry, who kept an apartment near famed Windansea Beach to indulge his two passions: science and surfing.
While Mullis may be an extreme, there is no doubt that La Jolla’s beauty and soft ocean breezes have made it easier for UC San Diego, Scripps, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, the Neurosciences Institute and other research institutions to recruit top brainpower.
Of the seven Nobel laureates, four have ties to UC San Diego: Francis Crick (physiology, 1962); Renato Dulbecco (medicine, 1977); Harry Markowitz (economics, 1990); and George Palade (medicine, 1974).
Crick and Dulbecco are primarily affiliated with the Salk Institute, along with Roger Guillemin (medicine, 1977). The institute was started by La Jolla’s most famous scientist, the late Dr. Jonas Salk, who, ironically, never won the Nobel Prize for his work in conquering polio.
The area’s major scientific institutions are relatively young--UC San Diego and the Salk Institute were founded in 1960. So, like an expansion sports team, La Jolla has had to fill its roster with superstar free agents in order to become quickly competitive. Indeed, most of the area’s laureates won their Nobels for work done before they got to La Jolla. The strategy has worked.
In the 1990s, for example, Dr. Gerald Edelman, recipient of the 1972 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine, decided to move his Neurosciences Institute from New York. He had feelers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton, UC Berkeley and La Jolla.
“I went back to my lab,” said Edelman, “and guess what? Everybody wanted to go to La Jolla. There are days in La Jolla when the confluence of weather and lifestyle are as good as the better parts of Greece, only for rich people.”
La Jolla, he said, “is a big factor” in recruitment.
Today, by two standards commonly applied by scientists--amount of grant money garnered and number of citations in scientific publications--the La Jolla institutions, private and public, have become national leaders.
Greg Lemke, professor of molecular neurobiology at Salk, said that scientists are attracted by the quality of research being done in La Jolla and by the collaborative possibilities of having dozens of top-notch institutions close together.
“This is a great place to do science, plus the beach is just five minutes away,” Lemke said. “One of our major problems with post-doctorates is convincing them to leave when it’s time to move on. La Jolla is very comfortable.”
La Jolla’s mystique as “a perfect place to live” has been key to region’s economic development, said Tina Nova, chief executive officer of Genoptix Inc. “That’s why this explosion of biotechnology and high-technology happened here, and not in Los Angeles or Orange County.”
For nearly three decades San Diego has had an aggressive policy of wooing research and technology companies to the Torrey Pines area and nearby Sorrento Valley. Years of scientific gatherings sponsored by UC San Diego and Salk have spread the word about La Jolla’s charms.
The lure of clean beaches, gorgeous views, restaurants and stylish housing is breeding its own kind of humor among the scientific and academic set.
“I have a friend at MIT who says that La Jolla is a very dangerous place: ‘You go to the beach and you can get trampled by the Nobel laureates,’ ” said Kim Prisk, professor of physiology at UC San Diego.
Dr. John C. Reed, scientific director of the Burnham Institute, a cancer research center in La Jolla, said the comfy surroundings help his institution and others retain key researchers who get job offers elsewhere, often for more money.
“Some people are confirmed urbanites and really want New York or Boston,” he said. “But what we’ve found is that after they’ve lived in La Jolla, very few are willing to leave.”
Their arcane dinner table conservation notwithstanding, the laureates and other science prize winners do not draw much attention to themselves. The average citizen, who can spot the latest Padre slugger a block away, probably does not recognize Crick as one of the men who cracked the code of DNA.
“It’s not as if they wear special uniforms or anything,” said San Diego Councilman Scott Peters, who represents La Jolla. “They’re just people around town until one day you read they’ve done something extraordinary.”
