Salk Considers Biologist at Princeton for Top Job

A Princeton University scientist is among the candidates being considered for the top post at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, a spokesman for the private research facility said Tuesday.

Arnold Levine, chairman of the department of molecular biology at Princeton, is one of several researchers the institute is talking to about the president’s position, according to Kenneth Klivington, a spokesman for the biological research facility.

Levine, 51, joined the faculty at Princeton in 1984, coming to the university from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He served as chairman of the department of microbiology in SUNY’s medical school.

The president’s post is now held by Nobel Prize winner Renato Dulbecco who has agreed to continue as president until 1992, Klivington said. Dulbecco, 77, assumed the position initially as acting president in 1988 with the understanding he would not be a candidate for the job, but stayed on after an East Coast biologist rejected the institute’s offer of the job last year.

If selected, Levine would be the institute’s fourth president since it was founded in 1960 by polio vaccine inventor Jonas Salk. Salk established the institute with a March of Dimes grant and the facility is now recognized among the top 10 research facilities worldwide.

Frederic de Hoffmann, held the reins at the institute for 18 years, retiring in November, 1988, after he became infected with the AIDS virus from a blood transfusion. De Hoffman, credited with keeping the private research facility financially solvent, died in October, 1989.

The institute now counts among its 45 faculty members three Nobel laureates. The staff also includes 175 other M.D. or Ph.D. researchers and another 300 employees.