Arnold J. Levine

Arnold J. Levine, is a United States Molecular biologist. He was awarded the 1998 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize for Biology or Biochemistry and was the first recipient of the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research in 2001 for his discovery of the tumor suppressor protein p53. He was the past President of Rockefeller University and opted to resign due to allegations that he had an inappropriate sexual encounter with a woman graduate student, under intoxication. According to the involved woman student, the encounter was consensual and currently Professor of Systems Biology at Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton New Jersey.

Career
Levine discovered, with several colleagues, the p53 tumor suppressor gene in 1979, a protein involved in cell cycle regulation, and one of the most frequently mutated genes in human cancer, in work done as a Professor in the biochemistry department at Princeton University. In 1979 Levine moved to become Chairman of the Department of Microbiology at Stony Brook School of Medicine before moving back to Princeton in 1984. In 1998 Levine became the Robert and Harriet Heilbrunn Professor of Cancer Biology and President of Rockefeller University. In 2002 he moved to the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and in 2004 added a joint appointment as Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Award and honors
In addition to the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize (Columbia University) and Albany Prize Levine has received numerous awards and honors. He was elected a Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1991, and a Member of the Institute of Medicine in 1995. He won the Ciba-Drew Award in 1995. The importance of p53 in cancer biology led to a number of cancer-related awards, including the Bristol-Myers Squibb Award for Distinguished Achievement in Cancer Research (1994), the Charles S. Mott Prize from the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation (1999), the Keio Medical Science Prize (2000).