It is always with excitement that I wake up in the morning wondering what my intuition will toss up to me, like gifts from the sea. I work with it and rely on it. It’s my partner.

Salk frames scientific creativity as a daily, lived relationship with intuition rather than a purely mechanical application of method. The metaphor of “gifts from the sea” suggests ideas arriving unpredictably—washed up from a vast, partly unconscious source—yet still requiring active “work” to shape them into usable knowledge. Calling intuition a “partner” emphasizes collaboration: disciplined research and experimental rigor do not replace intuition but refine and test it. In the context of twentieth-century biomedical research, the remark also pushes back against the stereotype of science as coldly rational, highlighting the imaginative, exploratory dimension that often precedes formal proof.