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A Brilliant Scientist But a Very Stupid Man
David Sabatini was (so the story goes) one of the world’s most brilliant cancer researchers and a tenured professor at MIT. He headed up a team of cancer researchers who were working on a breakthrough understanding of the cellular mechanism that triggers cancer in the body. There was talk of a Nobel Prize. Then, he met a woman.
The entrance to the wormhole can be found in Rockville, Maryland, at a hotel that Sabatini was staying at while attending a conference about lysosomes and cancer sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. There, on the night of April 18, 2018, after an evening of whiskey tasting—Sabatini is a whiskey aficionado—he and Kristin Knouse had sex. Knouse was an incoming cancer researcher at the Whitehead, where she would also head her own lab; hers focused on liver regeneration. He was 50. She was 29. He had split with his wife, and was in the process of getting a divorce.
The next month they met up at Knouse’s condo near Boston Common where they discussed a few ground rules for their tryst. They agreed they could see other people. Knouse, Sabatini remembers, had ongoing flings with men who she referred to with nicknames like “anesthesiologist (deleted, rhymes with cuck) buddy,” “finance bro,” and “physics professor,” and she wanted to keep it that way. Also, they wouldn’t tell anyone. Why complicate things at work? It was all supposed to be fun.
So this Sabatini fellow was thinking, “This is awesome. I get to screw a younger chick with no expectations for any kind of commitment. And there’s no way it can ever go wrong because we have a mutual understanding. I love modern sexual mores.”
Some two years later, he lost interest in the relationship at the same time his sex partner decided she wanted him to commit to her. Wow, who could have seen that coming? He broke things off, and she accepted the situation with dignity and took it as a “live and learn” moment. Just kidding, she filed a complaint with the HR department. She would claim that her texts and messages indicating that she was having a good time with the guy were actually symptoms of her abuse and trauma; an explanation so stupid only university officials or lawyers would believe it.
The institute’s administrators immediately hired lawyers to open an investigation.
The law firm Hinckley, Allen & Snyder (conducted) an investigation on “gender bias and/or inequities and a retaliatory leadership in the Sabatini lab.” The Whitehead never told Sabatini what he was accused of. Former lab members told me their co-workers were sobbing when they came out of meetings with the lawyers, saying that the lawyers had put words in their mouths. “They had a very strong agenda,” one of them told me.
Sabatini was not the woman’s supervisor, he didn’t even work directly with her. He never threatened her or proposed a quid pro quo. There was no indication that he had violated the institution’s sexual harassment policy. It didn’t matter. A woman had cried.
In the 24 hours after the report came out, Sabatini’s life fell apart. MIT put him on administrative leave. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, another prestigious non-profit that funds biomedical research and was paying Sabatini’s salary, fired him. He resigned from the Whitehead, and eventually MIT, at the advice of his lawyers who thought it would help him secure his next job. (“I one hundred percent regret that,” Sabatini told me).
Soon, the biotech startups he’d helped found— Navitor Pharmaceuticals, KSQ and Raze Therapeutics—started severing their relationships with him. Sabatini was axed from professorships, fellowships, and professional societies. Awards and grants were pulled. His income disappeared.
Wow, quite a price to pay for getting your rocks off, wasn’t it?
Feminist/Sexual Liberation propaganda holds that rules about monogamy, marriage, and fidelity were all made up by ‘the Patriarchy’ to oppress women and alphabet people. Nothing could be further from the truth. These rules about sex and relationships exist because unlimited sexual license is a recipe for disaster. These societal rules exist to protect both sexes from this kind of things.
Somewhere, Mike Pence is smiling.
Published in Culture
Defamation worked for Johnny. Is this guy a fighter or not?
Good post.
This part isn’t correct. Feminists believe it. Leftists believe it. Most of the media believes it. Sadly, juries sometimes believe it. Psychiatrists and psychologists believe it. HR employees believe it. The CEOs who are, at least theoretically, in charge of the HR department either believe it, or go along with it.
I’m a lawyer, and I don’t believe it.
Switching gears, I really like your conclusion, VTK. This guy seems to have been mistreated, and he does seem to be on the receiving end of a false allegation. But he’s a sexually immoral man.
We don’t seem to have a good word for this. The woman is a slut. What should we call the man? A cad?
Hmm. Why is he immoral? Because he’s having sex outside of the bonds of matrimony?
BTW, that’s OK. Just seeking clarification.
Well, yeah, but morality aside, he was really dumb.
The idea that a woman… any woman … is going to maintain a consistent emotional configuration throughout a relationship is risky proposition under any circumstances. When the relationship is with a professional colleague, it’s like tap dancing in a minefield wearing steel toed boots.
And the more a man has, the more he is at risk of losing.
Yes, of course.
I’m glad that you still think that it’s ok to hold to Biblical morality, I guess. It is terrible that our nation is so depraved that you have to say so.
I do think that this is because the siren song of liberty and tolerance has deceived many, even many who somehow think of themselves as conservatives.
Personally I would just call him a slut as well. Dude’s a slut, but one without female Me-Too privilege.
The preferred term around our house is “man-whore”
yes.
I was just talking to someone about the Deutero-Law that a man who seduces a woman is required to marry her or pay her bride price.
There are a lot of things I’d like to return to.
My boys will be taught that this is only one reason to hold out for marriage. And that to use a girl to get their rocks off is unacceptable.
And he’s only one of a zillion examples throughout human history of a powerful/intelligent/ambitious/etc. dude who has everything to lose being brought low by an ill-considered dalliance.
What is this about, guys? Is it really that difficult to keep the big picture in mind and say no?
Many of us were “settled” and married before the untrustworthiness of a consensual relationship came to the fore. While this is conjecture, Sabatini strikes me as the proverbial “egghead” who lost good sense when a (presumably) attractive woman paid him attention post break-up of a marriage.
Agree completely. This isn’t being addressed enough. And the idea that there are some women for marriage and others for well, not marriage, is appalling.
We do have a good word for it. We call Him “stud.” And We have for many years.
Eh, maybe. That might be true in this particular case. I’m skeptical that it would explain the broader phenomenon.
Step down from your high horse.
Women use sex as a tool since the beginning . It is the opposite side of the same coin .
No.
Dude, I’m not on a high horse. If anything, women are way worse. But I am asking why it is often so hard for rich powerful men not to think with their dicks.
Traditionally, women used sex to get a provider for themselves and their children.
Are you saying women should not expect that out of men? Go to that Samuel Block post where I point out that women stay with men for 7+ years before marrying them because they don’t think they can find anyone who would treat them better than that.
Men are not innocent for the current state of affairs. And I say that as a raging anti-feminist that blames toxic women for a helluva lot.
Hey, I’m one of those too! :-)
When my husband and I first started dating we had a conversation that included that last comment. It’s so much smaller than their brain. “Oh?” He says. “Yeah, nothing could be smaller.” He still holds it over my head 14 years later.
Ok, mis interpreted your position.
I am with you on matrimony and the rolls. All I am saying is women are equally foolish, selfish and evil when it concerns sex.
Their dicks are what drive most rich powerful Men to become rich and powerful.
“First you get the money. Then you get the power. Then you get the women.”
But why does the slut win and the cad loses?
And yet they usually win the lawsuits, HR disputes, etc.
Because Our society will no longer judge sluts and has a hostility against success.
Gigolo, or that that a male consort?
Much as I might like to put the genie back in the bottle, the [redacted] back in every horny man’s pants, and every unmarried women’s knees back together, I think–human nature being what it is–that’s going to be a rather heavy lift, and has defeated sages far better qualified than I over past millenia. They’re both at fault for immoral behavior. I’m not going to go any further than that.
And (but me no buts) what happened to him is appalling. There’s no room for equivocating or remotely implying that perhaps he deserved it because he was having an affair with a consenting but manipulative and vindictive adult woman. There’s more than one kind of depravity on display in this situation, as the lengthy and sorry saga of Sabatini’s employment and legal woes makes very clear.
Charlotte, I think that it’s hard for all men. But women like the rich, powerful men, so those guys have more opportunities.
Love you two!