He Was a World-Renowned Cancer Researcher. Now's He's Collecting Unemployment.- Behind the fall of David Sabatini, 'one of the greatest scientists' of his generation.
"In 2018, David Sabatini was a
world-renowned molecular biologist. - He was a tenured professor at MIT. He ran a major lab at the Whitehead Institute, overseeing a team of 39 researchers, postdocs and technicians. Their job was to disentangle the mystery of the mTOR signaling pathway, a protein Sabatini had discovered while still in medical school, at Johns Hopkins. The mTOR signaling pathway plays a critical role in tumor development. Figuring out how it works would go a long way toward saving countless lives.
This was why Sabatini was predicted to win the Nobel Prize.
- It was how he reeled in between three and four million dollars every year for his lab from the National Institutes of Health, the Pentagon and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, among others. It is why his colleagues have described him to me with words like “genius,” “one of the best scientists alive,” and “a pillar.”
...Today, Sabatini is unemployed and unemployable.
No one wants to be associated with him.
Those who do risk losing their jobs, publishing opportunities, friends, visas, and huge federal grants. “What wormhole did my life take, to billionaires and protests and being called a sexual predator? What quirk in the universe allowed this to happen?” Sabatini asked me..."
