California State University took over the former Zzyzx Mineral Springs in 1976, transforming what had been a health retreat into a genuine research facility. Seven CSU campuses participate in the consortium: Dominguez Hills, Fullerton, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Northridge, San Bernardino, and Cal Poly Pomona. Together they run a facility that offers what the Mojave Desert uniquely offers — extreme conditions, minimal light pollution, and ecosystems that have no analogs elsewhere.

The center's research programs span biology, geology, ecology, and environmental science. Students and researchers come to study what the desert contains rather than how to escape from it. Springer's spa cabins became dormitories. His auditorium became a lecture hall. The landscape that he cultivated for therapeutic tourism became the subject of actual inquiry.

Lake Tuendae was Springer's creation — a man-made pond intended to give his resort a picturesque focal point. When the California Department of Fish and Game transplanted the endangered Mohave tui chub into the lake in 1971, it was a conservation measure made necessary by the destruction of the species' natural habitat elsewhere. The fish survived. They are now one of only two populations of Mohave tui chub known to exist, which means that the continued existence of this species depends in part on a lake built by a man running an illegal operation in the desert.

The Saratoga Springs pupfish, another endemic desert species, also finds refuge in the center's area. Both fish represent a larger pattern: the Mojave Desert contains biological communities that evolved in isolation and have nowhere else to go.

The Desert Studies Center has recorded more than 200 bird species in its area — a number that reflects the Mojave's role as a migration corridor. Birds moving between the Pacific Coast and the interior of North America cross the desert in great numbers, and the springs at Zzyzx, one of the few reliable water sources in this stretch of the desert, serve as a waystation.

The center's location on the edge of the Mojave Road and near Baker makes it accessible for researchers without being so developed that it loses the qualities they come to study. The night skies here are dark enough for serious astronomical observation. The silence, broken only by wind and wildlife, allows acoustic research impossible in urban environments.

Springer invented the name Zzyzx in 1944 because he wanted it to be the last word in the English language — a marketing gimmick that turned out to have more lasting power than anything else he created. Reader's Digest named it the most difficult place name to pronounce in California. Michael Connelly set scenes from his 2004 novel The Narrows there. The name persists in a way that Springer's health claims never did.

The Desert Studies Center operates under the name without irony. Researchers studying cactus wrens or measuring soil temperatures at Zzyzx are doing work that Springer never contemplated, in a place he created for entirely different reasons, with a name that has outlasted him by decades.