Salk Researcher Joins the Elite of Science

Salk Institute researcher Leslie E. Orgel was elected this week to membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the nation’s most prestigious scientific society.

Orgel, who also is an adjunct professor of chemistry at the University of California, San Diego, conducts experiments aimed at answering the question of how life originated on the primitive Earth. He studies simple, self-replicating nucleic acid molecules.

Orgel’s election brings to six the number of Salk faculty members in the 1,600-member National Academy. UCSD has 51.