La Jolla’s Salk Institute gets $50 million gift to seek better ways to slow climate change

The Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla has received a $50 million gift to support its efforts to find ways to get plants to more effectively capture and store atmospheric carbon, a strategy seen as essential to fighting climate change.

The donation came from Hess Corp., a New York-based energy company that finds and processes crude oil and natural gas for global markets.

The gift comes three years after Hess gave Salk $12.5 million to help establish its Harnessing Plants Initiative, which is focused on removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on a global scale. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos gave Salk $30 million that year to support the program.

A year earlier, in 2019, Salk got nearly $35 million from the Audacious Project, which is part of the TED Foundation, to help start the program.

The donation adds momentum to Salk’s effort to raise $750 million in gifts during a seven-year period ending in 2028. The money will be used to expand and diversify scientific programs at the private institute, which was founded by the late Jonas Salk, who developed the first widely effective vaccine against polio.

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The Salk Institute says it will use the $50 million Hess gift to recruit faculty and support its research, which currently centers on finding better ways to store more carbon in six essential crops — corn, soybeans, canola, rice, wheat and sorghum.

Salk researcher Wolfgang Busch told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 2020 that “we need to make plant roots bigger so they can store more carbon, get the roots to grow deeper in the soil and get those roots to hold on to the carbon longer.

“We believe these changes can be made through breeding and genetic engineering.” ◆