Arnold J. Levine
Arnold Jay Levine is an American 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 is currently Professor Emeritus of Systems Biology at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
Career
Levine received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1966.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, Levine resigned the presidency following allegations that he had an inappropriate sexual encounter with a female graduate student, while both were intoxicated. According to the woman involved, the encounter was consensual and blown out of proportion.
In 2002 he was appointed professor at The Cancer Institute of New Jersey in New Brunswick, New Jersey, then a part of the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. Simultaneous to this appointment, in 2003, Levine became a visiting professor, then professor, in the newly created Simons Center for Systems Biology at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he has remained since.
In 2017, Levine, with collaborators Benjamin Greenbaum, and Marta Luksza, developed the first mathematical model for predicting patient response to immunotherapy. Their recent work extends to studying immune resistance mechanisms and patterns of evolution.