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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
It doesn’t appear that this thing is over yet. Maybe they can both lose.
Careful! I’m also an atheist who doesn’t care about homosexuality!
It won’t ever be perfect because it never was. But I think educating the next generation in the way they should go CAN and COULD create pockets of these morals. Salt and light. Eventually, the world will be so bogged down in the chaos of their choices, they’ll recognize some people are pursuing a better way. But we have to help those people exist by teaching our kids and those we have influence over.
Christendom post Rome was not built in a day.
This is such a fundamental observation. Why don’t more people understand this?
I guess that might depend some on who you think needs protection. They were both consenting adults, aka volunteers. The current-real-world problems don’t exist until someone – usually if not always the woman – basically wants to withdraw their consent retroactively. And if larger society goes along with it. After saying women are equal etc etc, it switches suddenly to “oh you poor helpless dear” and the man is “WTF? I thought women wanted to be equal?”
Now of course it’s valid to point out that sometimes all people need to be protected from themselves, but have you tried telling women that?
Especially in a world where the definition of “rape” has devolved into “any sexual contact which the woman later regrets.”
Great post, Victor Tango Kilo.
It brought back these words to me. They seem every bit as true now as when Oscar Wilde observed men and women interacting and said or wrote them.
“Woman begins by resisting a man’s advances and ends by blocking his retreat.”
I guess it’s a big mistake to believe human nature changes.
He could have married her and had precisely the same outcome.
I agree with all of the above, was fortunate to be raised to act and think responsibly and to believe that morals and societal norms are good things to live by, project, and have in ones behavioral mindset. Those values continue to inform my family’s life, and I have the greatest respect for those who raise their children, and their families, in a similar way. Would that all children were so loved and so lucky.
The rest of this story–of a maliciousness and vindictiveness, and of a wider society which props up and rewards delusional thinking and which encourages–nay, requires–people who have no knowledge of the matter, and no facts to hand to join a howling mob and actively participate in the complete destruction of another person’s life; to get his employer to fire him and then prevent his employment anywhere else by mounting campaigns of intimidation against those willing to hire him; to threaten his colleagues with withholding their NIH research funding if they had any contact with Sabatini at all; and to isolate, humiliate, and shame him almost out of existence is something else that needs desperately to be fixed, but molding young minds in the proper direction here will take years or decades, and I think there needs to be a course correction sooner than that.
I read that Substack article when it first came out, and it’s notable that there’s simply not a shred of evidence that, other than a consensual affair with a woman who had no connection to his work life,** Sabatini was guilty of anything. All this hooha about hostile workplace, and toxic masculinity, is a fiction, as is regularly acknowledged in the 250-page report of Sabatini’s behavior. It finds him guilty of only one thing–not disclosing his relationship with Knouse. It resorts to mealy mouthed talk of “sexual undercurrents,” and says things like “that [Knouse] felt the need to act ‘fun’ to impress Sabatini” somehow only served to “confirm his influence over her.”
What mendacious piffle. One might think that Sabatini’s view of “science above all else,” as an objective measure, might insulate him from accusations of harassment, gender bias, or creating a hostile work environment. But no. Too much focus on science seems to be just as sexist as not enough.
IMHO, this is the horrifying story here. I note the disappointing behavior on the part of Sabatini and Knouse in having an extramarital (on the part of Sabatini, who was in the midst of a divorce process) affair. But I am utterly appalled and disgusted by the rest of it, and that is the focus of my outrage. Were I a major donor (or even a minor donor) to MIT or its Whitehead Institute, I’d be pulling my funds and working out what else I could do to cause it hurt.
**Sabatini was the head of a lab at the Whitehead which focused on cancer research. Knouse was a new hire who heads her own lab at the Whitehead which focuses on liver regeneration. To talk about some sort of power imbalance dynamic with this couple, as if Sabatini was Knouse’s kryptonite, is ludicrous.
1960’s feminists invented ‘free love’ men have been paying for it ever since.
The 1960’s feminists didn’t invent free love. They weren’t even the ones to talk everyone into trying it again. At least they weren’t the first ones this time around. I think Hugh Hefner was.
Probably that’s true, it seemed like a good line. I was thinking of Tom Cruise’s line from “Reacher” about the most expensive woman being free…
And I’m another. But you don’t have to be a feminist to object to double standards to male and female behaviour. Men blaming feminists for some men’s sexual incontinence is just Adam blaming Eve for giving him the apple all over again.
I listen to a lot of podcasts, mostly conservative or self described classic liberals. There’s a message out there that a woman who sleeps around is a ‘low value’ woman and is damaged goods because all the sex has nobbled the part of her brain which would make her able to commit to a relationship or something. I haven’t heard any one talk about the possibility of rehab for her, apparently she gets to spend the rest of her life with cats and going got women’s marches.
Young men however are not told there’s consequences for being promiscuous. They can pick a ‘high value’ woman for marriage without any mention of what physical and emotional baggage they might be carrying in with them.
Can we agree that this is not something you would advise your own sons?
Mad Scientist with beautiful, younger, brilliant assistant can work. But… the game has a price: 20-hour days in a dungeon laboratory out in the middle of nowhere. This is why a vital part of STEM education must – MUST – include mastery of the rich Western literary-to-film tradition!
And apparently, given the odds and what was likely a steady stream of hopeful male and female researchers in his lab, some variant of this did work for Sabatini for more than two decades. Not a single complaint was lodged against him until after Knouse started her campaign. Then it began. According to the Substack article (they interviewed dozens of people for this piece and had access to numerous legal filings and documents. It appears to be impeccably sourced):
To reiterate, there doesn’t seem to be a single bit of evidence that Sabatini ran a lab riddled with “bro-culture.” (Oh, the horror.) In fact, the 250-page law firm report’s conclusion begins with the words (emphasis added): “While we have not found any evidence that Sabatini discriminates against or fails to support females in his lab…” before it goes on to talk about his oppression of women and his determination to throw “obstacles” in their way. And that’s the report–one that found no evidence of malfeasance or wrongdoing–that precipitated all the fallout, to the point that Sabatini’s life is now ruined, and that he–once a world-class scientist with very real potential to save millions of lives–can’t get a job and complete his work at any research institution in the United States.
I don’t think it’s a shock to anyone that supremely gifted people can be difficult and sometimes unpleasant to deal with and work for. And it appears that Sabatini had a reputation for being a bit of a bastard, albeit a pretty fair one, to work for. It’s chilling to me to think that this incredibly petty and vindictive witch-hunt has taken out someone with such potential, without simply nudging him back within the lines if he was–in fact–coloring the least bit outside them in his work life (something of which there’s no evidence, according to the report that “convicted” him.)
If I were to put on my tinfoil hat, I suppose I might start following the money and looking to see who’s got Sabatini’s funding now, what they’re doing with it, and what their relationship is to the other players in this disgusting farce. Cui bono? One might ask.
Not exactly, income lost but not the job. Less bad???
Wow.
Yes, you’re right. It seems she saw she could do this because she recognized who would benefit from his ruin.
It’s not “double standards.” Men want sex all the time. Women hold the power if it happens. If She says, “Yes,” then it’s a conquest. That’s what makes Him a “stud.”
Life lesson 101: Men eff Women, Women get effed by Men. Women have to bear the children, which makes sex an awesome responsibility for Them. And if the chicks are too easy, They’re “whores.”
There ain’t no “rehab” for Her. Her Parents should have instilled that. Best She could do is not mention the number to Her current beau.
I would advise My sons about chicks getting pregnant, stds from Them, and psychos Who would ruin Their Lives. “Son, have Them sign this contract or don’t talk or do anything with Them. Don’t trust any of Them.”
It’s a guy thing . . .
Or Charlie Sheen’s response to the journalist:
Q: “why pay prostitutes for for sex, aren’t there a lot of women fans who would supply it for free”.
A: “you don’t pay for them for sex, you pay them so they leave”.
Yeah, but it doesn’t work. Ask former President Trump. I’m sure he paid Stormy Daniels, expecting her to go away quietly when he no longer had a reason to continue his association with her.
It stands out to me that not only might Sabatini have prevented Knouse from having as much power to do this to him if, when the rules at his workplace changed, if he had acknowledged immediately that they had, or had had a relationship, Knouse might not have had the level of anger that motivated her to do this. Her behavior almost seems to say “You wouldn’t acknowledge us (you and me) in our social environment. So now I’ll make sure the people in our social environment don’t dare acknowledge you.”
I don’t think all the years of feminism have changed the fact that women, consciously or unconsciously, expect to get increased status from being, or from having been, involved with a man sexually, if that man has more status than they have.
I think men don’t, quite as often or as strongly, have that same expectation for their sexual involvements with women, though men have that expectation too.
Okay, here’s the difference: We aren’t using this word anymore, but it’s still viewed as UNMANLY, if not something worse, for a man to come forward and say about a higher status woman, or any woman, “We had a secret affair” or “We had a secret affair and she was abusive”. Men have always, maybe, felt angry and hurt about being treated like discarded toys (“Alas, my love, you do me wrong to cast me off so discourteously…”and all that) but it doesn’t as much get them anywhere to play the victim when they’re hurt realizing an unacknowledged—-publicly unacknowledged, I mean—- sexual relationship with some woman is over.
I doubt he paid her until she threatened to go public
Free love in recent Western history** goes back to the late-eighteenth century and the likes of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin and William Blake (all of whom believed that marriage was a form of sexual slavery, and all of whose biographies get terribly confusing and convoluted as a result.) The movement grew in various forms throughout the nineteenth-century, mostly among intellectuals and artists and some politicians (some things never change). And as it grew, numerous short-lived utopian and socialist communities were founded in the US, UK and Europe to prove the benefits of the communal (in every sense of the word) system.
1960s feminists and Hugh Hefner were at the tail-end of a long tradition, not visionaries at all.
Somehow, if we are to believe many here, it seems that 1970s, and following, men have been–en masse–uniquely fooled by the siren song of the 1960s ‘feminists,’ have been unable to resist their wiles, and are now all victims of the sisterhood. Sorry. Not buying it. I think that the Pill, and other ancient and modern trappings which support indiscriminate hookups have benefited horny men at least as much as loose women. A pox on them all. (See what I did there.)
It’s so tempting to drop cheap one-liners dismissing or demeaning an entire sex. And sometimes it’s amusing. And it’s almost never grounds for suspension or firing. (See WaPo reporter Dave Weigel. Also note that, in this case at least, the woman leading the outrage theater went too far, even for the Washington Post, and was subsequently fired herself.) But such exchanges don’t generally add much light to the debate.
**There are also plenty of examples of communal free-love utopias in ancient history and through the Middle Ages.
I don’t think Trump paid her anything. I think the money came from Trump’s lawyer, or advisor, or something, and it wasn’t Trump’s money at all. That’s why it turned into such a circus and resulted in congressional hearings on whether or not the payment (wherever it came from) was a violation of campaign finance laws, as it could be considered a in-kind campaign donation intended to bolster Trump’s chances of winning by shutting down a potentially embarrassing story. The Federal Election Commission dropped the inquiry last year, saying it couldn’t prove that Trump had knowingly violated the law. IIRC, there was a second, similar, case, involving another woman. The silver lining in the Stormy Daniels case was the appearance of Michael Avenatti, pretender to the Presidency, and all-around lout, but highly entertaining to watch the media meltdown both pro and con.
Weird that we keep being fooled, by changes in superficial trappings, into thinking something that never worked out well before will work out well now.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and…”
I won’t get us off the subject by asking where the money came from, or could have come from, if it didn’t come from Trump.
This is NOT true. Maybe experienced women exercise power, but men hold power over innocent women.
Quite frequently, women’s earliest sexual encounters are giving sex in hopes of commitment and love. Everyone knows what men want. And it’s easy for them to get it. But commitment? Thing of the past, baby. And only men hold the keys to that.
While you are legally correct-morally it is the same as if Trump paid her (to be quiet)- flunkies acting “independently” to benefit a powerful man is the oldest dodge in the book (as in the King asking rhetorically, but loudly, “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?”). The Clinton’s always made sure there were cut outs between them and their morally suspect behavior ( also, see Hunter Biden’s 10% for the “big guy’). We should understand that it is the same as if Trump paid her. If Trump paid her there was no legal problem-paying some one to shut up isn’t a crime unless the behavior you are hiding is criminal. But no politician wants his dirty laundry aired.
I’m possibly misreading this, but my first thought was that commitment goes a lot farther than the beginning. I don’t know the numbers but there are shades of divorces that are initiated by women, and not necessarily because of the males’ behavior.
In the end, the court ruled she had to pay him.
Donald Trump getting a hooker to pay him for sex; that’s a baller move, I tell you what.
It’s also fair that things turned out that way. Daniels may have had to put the squeeze on him, but Trump arranged to get her what must have been understood between them to be hush money. She shouldn’t have taken and cashed the check if she didn’t intend to honor the unspoken agreement to shut up.