Soon after her dismissal, in early 2018, sitting on her couch at home with the latest issues of Science and Nature on the coffee table, Beverly Emerson told me she was not done with science. She showed me the pipettes, painted with her initials, that she’d brought home from her lab. Later, a position at Oregon Health & Science University would let her continue to work on her projects. But she won’t be getting all the benefits of an elder stateswoman. Emeritus professors often stick around institutions for decades; some former researchers still drop into the Salk for lunch.

Jones and Lundblad settled their suits in August 2018, about a year after filing. The details of the settlement are confidential, and both women are forbidden to make any further comments to the media. (All interviews for this story took place before the settlement.) But they both retained their employment at the Salk, and are expected to stay there for the foreseeable future. Emerson continued her suit alone for several more months, but in November 2018 she also settled. The Salk admitted no liability in connection with any of the settlements. Emerson hoped, she’d said, that the lawsuit would lead to better outcomes for the current generation of women. There are more now: Clodagh O’Shea was promoted to full professor in February 2018, the first woman to achieve that rank since Emerson in 1999. And the institute has hired others: Susan Kaech from Yale, and Kay Tye from M.I.T.

Nearly everyone who has worked there — including the women who sued it — say the Salk Institute has lived up to its founders’ promise in many ways; the lack of bureaucracy facilitates real scientific breakthroughs. But the lawsuit’s claims suggest the lack of formal governance also made a push for equity impossible, and let a power structure formed in the ’60s survive to the present day.

On April 21, 2018, Dan Lewis, the chairman of the Salk’s board, sent a notice to Salk employees announcing that Inder Verma had been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation of allegations of sexual assault. “Dr. Verma has made extraordinary contributions to scientific research,” he wrote, but “Salk will not condone any findings of inappropriate conduct in the workplace, regardless of one’s stature or influence.” The stories published soon after suggested otherwise. As reported by Meredith Wadman in Science that month, eight women, including Emerson and Mellon, accused Verma of sexual assault in a variety of professional situations: pinching the buttocks of a woman who had come to interview for a faculty position; forcibly kissing a young scientist in his lab in 1992; grabbing and kissing Emerson in the Salk library in 2001. The incidents spanned four decades, from 1976 to 2016. In the late 1980s, Mellon reported to the Salk’s human resources department that Verma had once grabbed her breasts at a faculty party, and didn’t let go until she kicked him in the shins. She was told she needed counseling, and, she told me, was asked not to share her claim with anyone later. In a statement, Verma wrote that he had “never inappropriately touched, nor have I made any sexually charged comments, to anyone affiliated with the Salk Institute,” and has since produced a statement of support signed by 56 former students and postdocs.

In the same email announcing that the Salk would take these alleged claims seriously, Lewis announced that Rusty Gage, long one of the Institute’s stars, would be the next president. Verma resigned two months later.

Anila Madiraju came to the Salk in 2015 as a postdoc, after completing her Ph.D. in cellular and molecular physiology at Yale. Since she was 13 — when she would tag along with her father, a cancer biologist, to his lab — her dream has been a career in academic science, and the Salk seemed like an institution that embodied scientific freedom and creativity. She says she has been treated well there, and her current adviser is one of many excellent male mentors she has had in her career so far.

And yet at every stage in her career, the future has seemed less certain. “It’s hard already,” she says, “even before you throw gender into the mix.” She’s watched successful students fail to land tenure-track positions, or be hired as assistant professors only to struggle with funding. She’ll be applying for jobs in a year or two, but worries about a lack of opportunity, even considering alternate careers. When Science reported on the claims against Verma, she read the story three times.