In 2022, when I first profiled the erstwhile Massachusetts Institute of Technology molecular biologist David Sabatini, he was collecting unemployment. And he was unemployable.
Before then, Sabatini, known primarily for his discovery of a protein pathway crucial to understanding the regulation of cell growth and metabolism, which is essential to cancer research, ran one of the biggest labs at Whitehead Institute, which is affiliated with MIT. He led dozens of other researchers and received millions in annual funding for nearly 25 years. But after a younger colleague, Kristin Knouse, accused Sabatini of sexual harassment after their consensual relationship went sideways, everything came crashing down for the man who was considered a Nobel Prize contender within the scientific community.
“What quirk in the universe allowed this to happen?” Sabatini asked me back then. An internal investigation conducted for Whitehead by the law firm Hinckley, Allen & Snyder found that Sabatini had run afoul of the institute’s policies for failing to disclose his relationship with Knouse and for creating a “sexualized undercurrent” in his lab. He was fired from his post, then from all the biotech start-ups he was affiliated with. Over the next few months, he lost a lot of hair and 35 pounds, and he cried a lot. “I lost everything,” he said. “My whole life imploded.”