Johnson & Johnson CEO Weldon to step down in April

Vice Chairman Alex Gorsky, 51, will become CEO effective April 26, the date of J&J's next board meeting, the company said. Gorsky was also nominated to the board, it added. Weldon, 63, remains the chairman.

The conglomerate, which had more than 250 companies under the J&J umbrella, has been plagued by a series of massive recalls across a wide range of product and medicine lines over the past two years.

The quality control problems at J&J's consumer healthcare unit were deemed so pervasive that last March, U.S. health regulators took over supervision of three J&J manufacturing plants.

The latest black mark came just last Friday, when the company said it was recalling the entire U.S. supply -- 574,000 bottles -- of its Infant Tylenol soon after the product had returned to pharmacy shelves.

Gorsky is the latest in a long line of CEOs to come from within the company, although he left in 2004 for a four-year stint as Novartis' head pharmaceuticals in North America before returning to J&J.

Gorsky began his J&J career in 1988 as a sales representative with the Janssen Pharmaceutica unit. In 2001, he was appointed President of Janssen, and in 2003, Gorsky became Company Group Chairman of Johnson & Johnson's pharmaceuticals business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. After returning to the J&J fold he became global chairman of the Surgical Care Group.

"It is a testament to the leadership development and succession planning process at Johnson & Johnson that Mr. Gorsky, like all of the previous chief executives in the company's 126-year history, was appointed from within the organization," Jim Cullen, a member of the board of directors, said in a statement.

(Reporting by Bill Berkrot and Michele Gershberg; Editing by Richard Chang)