Yale Dean to Quit Med School Post After Year's Stay

The dean of the Yale Medical School, whose connections with a major pharmaceutical company were disclosed in recent congressional hearings, will leave Yale to become the president of Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Institute in New York.

Dr. Lewis Thomas, the Yale dean, will resign on July 1, Yale President Kingman Brewster Jr. announced last week.

Thomas was appointed dean last July 1. The briefness of his tenure raised speculation that his resignation was related to the disclosure in congressional hearings last October that Thomas and Robert H. Ebert, dean of the Harvard Medical School, were both paid consultants to the Squibb Corporation, a major pharmaceutical manufacturer.

No Relation

Doubts about a possible conflict of nterest were brought up after the disclosure.

"There is no relation whatsoever between the Squibb thing and my resignation," Thomas, reached at his home in Connecticut, said yesterday.

A spokesman for The Yale Daily News said yesterday that Thomas's new job would be much more prestigious and that his salary would be substantially higher than his present one.

Leading Job

Steve Kezerian, director of Yale's News Bureau, said last week that Thomas' new position will be "one of the leading jobs in the country involving cancer research," the Daily News reported.

President Brewster is naming a special faculty committee to help him in the search for a new dean. However, no obvious candidates have been mentioned for the position.

Thomas came to Yale in 1969 as the chairman of the Department of Pathology.