He's since set up a lab in Prague and Boston, according to Wikipedia
From 2022:
He Was a World-Renowned Cancer Researcher. Now He's Collecting Unemployment.
"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...
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 fuck 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.
But then, in August 2018, the Whitehead adopted a new Consensual Sexual and Romantic Relationships Policy, which stated that lab heads couldn’t have a “consensual or sexual relationship” with any coworkers. “Not going to H.R. right then was my critical mistake,” Sabatini told me.
At the time, Sabatini didn’t think it mattered much. Things were fizzling. He still cared for Knouse, and they were still close—he had a cancer scare in late 2018, and when he found out he wasn’t dying, she was one of the few people he texted. But he was getting involved with another woman, a microbiologist in Germany.
Knouse didn’t want to let go. In January 2020 she texted, in part: “I get anxious when I don’t hear back from you and then I see you post stuff on Twitter and it provides an admittedly small and silly but still another bit of evidence to this growing feeling that you don't care about me in the way that I care about you.” He wrote back: “I am sorry but you are being crazy.” In another text, Knouse admitted feeling “stung.” She added: “I think it’s worth thinking about whether you want someone who matches your passion, intellect, and ambition.” He wrote back: “I have to explore this.”...
For a few months, Knouse broke off communication with him. Then Covid hit. In April 2020, she reached out via text. She made a dorky joke about the pandemic and enemas. They griped about Covid safety protocols. She invited him and his son to her family’s beach house on Cape Cod for some “low density private beach and pool action.” She bought a new red Audi and sent him a picture of it. Her grandmother died, and he told her he was sorry for her loss, and they went back and forth about her traveling to Pennsylvania for the funeral. “A big hug,” he texted her, “and a safe travels!”
Then, in late summer or early fall—when the whole country was gripped by protests and riots, and everyone was apologizing and reckoning—something changed.
In October 2020, Knouse texted her friends that she was “unpack[ing] a ton of suppressed abuse and trauma from an obvious local source”—an apparent reference to Sabatini. Knouse’s fellowship at the Whitehead was ending, and she didn’t apply for any faculty jobs there. When the new director, Ruth Lehmann, called Knouse to ask why, Knouse complained for the first time of being “harassed.”
In November, Knouse warned her friend—an incoming Whitehead fellow—to “squeeze out as much advice as possible before your mentor is Weinstein’ed out of science.”
In December, at Lehmann’s behest, the consulting firm Jones Diversity sent the Whitehead employees a survey “based in part on Dr. Knouse’s false complaint about Dr. Sabatini,” according to a complaint later brought by Sabatini. All participants were anonymous. Five or so of the nearly 40 employees in Sabatini’s lab took part.
The next month, two former Sabatini lab members lodged complaints to H.R.—the first complaints against him in his 24-year tenure—about “bro culture” in the lab.
This prompted the Whitehead to hire the law firm Hinckley, Allen & Snyder to conduct 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...
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.
On August 20, Lehmann officially cut ties with Sabatini in an email sent to the whole institute. That was leaked to the Boston Globe within minutes; the news was circulating on Twitter within hours.
“I lost everything. My whole life imploded,” Sabatini said. “I became a shell of what I was.”...
So what exactly had those 248 pages said? What had David Sabatini been found guilty of that merited this kind of punishment? Chiefly, failing to disclose his consensual relationship with Knouse. On top of that, the report found that Sabatini, in his day-to-day administration of the lab, violated the Whitehead’s Anti-Harassment Policy, since his “behavior created a sexualized undercurrent in the lab.” Sabatini’s relationship with Knouse exacerbated things, given his “indirect influence” over her, which violated the Anti-Harassment Policy and ran afoul of the “spirit” if not the letter of another of the institute's policies.
True, he didn’t supervise Knouse. He didn’t work directly with her. He never threatened her or proposed a quid pro quo. And he certainly didn’t have the power to fire her. But, according to the report, he had “experience, stature, and age” over her. Knouse’s apparent desire to continue their relationship only served to confirm his influence: “That she felt the need to act ‘fun’ to impress Sabatini underscores how Sabatini’s words and actions profoundly impacted her,” the lawyers wrote.
Nor did the lawyers care for the happy hours and whiskey tastings that Sabatini sometimes hosted in his office, which betrayed his “apparent ‘friendliness’ and general propensity to have ‘fun.’” (Knouse, in her counterclaim, says the events were “drunken,” and “conversations quite frequently veered to the sexual.”)
“While we have not found any evidence that Sabatini discriminates against or fails to support females in his lab, we find that Sabatini’s propensity to praise or gravitate toward those in the lab that mirror his desired personality traits, scientific success, or view of ‘science above all else,’ creates additional obstacles for female lab members,” the report concluded.
This was baffling to everyone I spoke to: Nine of Sabatini’s current and former lab employees, a current faculty member at the Whitehead, and half a dozen top doctors and scientists in Sabatini’s field. Most of them would not speak on the record for fear of being associated with Sabatini and derailing their own careers. “It’s impossible to be honest about this and preserve your own skin,” says a scientist who recently worked under Sabatini.
That trainee called the report’s depiction of the lab an “alternate reality,” and the characterization of Sabatini as lascivious and retaliatory “deeply insane.”
“They have the wrong guy,” a female scientist who knows Sabatini and Knouse told me. A female former trainee told me that the climate in Sabatini’s lab was “one of excellence.” She said that Sabatini could be demanding, but he was never demeaning or unfair. “I try to emulate him in my own lab,” another female former trainee said. A third female trainee said the lab could be informal, but it was hardly a locker room. “It just wasn’t in the air.“
I asked a former technician about the notorious whiskey tastings. “These weren’t keggers,” he said. “‘Bench scientists’ and ‘party’ don’t generally overlap.”
The allegations over the relationship and the ones about the lab’s culture served to reinforce each other; if Sabatini was so ill-advised as to hook up with a younger colleague, surely his bad judgment spilt over into his (extremely well-funded) lab. Making such a claim also appeared to be advantageous to the Whitehead.
For one, it would allow Lehmann to be seen as a no-nonsense leader with zero tolerance for the sexism in science that she saw as a challenge. It would also pacify Knouse, who wanted to see Sabatini fired publicly. “Part of me just wants to organize a protest outside of Whitehead and this would be over in a matter of hours not weeks,” wrote Knouse to a friend during the investigation.
Then, there’s the money.
Until recently, the NIH deterred institutions from firing or even investigating scientists who brought in a lot of NIH money, because that money usually followed the scientists—not the institutions. So for years, universities and other research organizations often turned a blind eye to their superstars’ bad behavior for fear of losing multi-million-dollar grants. To correct this, the NIH amended its policy in June 2020. Moving forward, if principal investigators are accused of “harassment, bullying, retaliation, or hostile working conditions” recipient institutions are obligated to alert the NIH, who would use the information to decide whether or not to reassign the grant. The NIH hoped to end the game of “pass the harasser.”
The Whitehead’s arrangement with NIH is especially lucrative: On top of all the grant money it brings in, the institute also gets a nearly 95 percent “facilities and administrative” or F&A fee, as insiders put it. (Usually, NIH pays organizations 25 to 50 percent.) Every $500,000 Sabatini reeled in was actually worth closer to $1 million to the Whitehead. “Once they decided a priori to fire him, that kind of dictated how the investigation needed to be done in order to keep any NIH money,” said a former trainee. “It would be a perfect kill shot. By doing it the way they did it, they guaranteed he couldn’t be hired, and where’s he going to take the grants if he can’t be hired?”...
At a meeting after Sabatini’s case was filed, on November 3, 2021 Lehmann, Kay Hodge, the Whitehead’s attorney, and the head of HR informed those left in the lab that NIH rules barred those who had worked under Sabatini from having any contact with him at all. When some of them objected—Sabatini, at that point, was just a guy living in Boston—a scientist who was there recalled Hodge warning them: “You wouldn’t want to jeopardize your future eligibility for NIH funding.” There was a chill in the room. “That’s a death sentence,” the scientist said.
The whole thing was baffling to those who know Sabatini. “It’s as if the best player in the NFL got cut because he said something politically incorrect on social media,” Peter Attia, a medical expert on longevity and a close friend of Sabatini, told me. “In my opinion, he’s one of the top five scientists of his generation in my area,” said Ben Neel, who runs NYU’s cancer center. I asked a former trainee what she made of Sabatini’s reputation. “You don’t have to ask me, just look at his PubMed,” she said, referring to his copious list of published findings.
In late 2021, six months after he resigned, Dafna Bar-Sagi, the Vice Dean of Science at NYU Langone Health, which comprises New York University’s medical school and several hospitals, called Sabatini. He was an old friend. She knew about everything that had happened, and she wanted to check in on him. He lamented that no one would ever hire him again. Bar-Sagi said he was being silly. Of course, she said, someone somewhere would give him a job. He was the famous David Sabatini. Finally, he asked her point blank, Would she?
On a bright, breezy Wednesday morning in late April on the corner of 30th Street and First Avenue, in the shadow of the huge, glass buildings that make up part of NYU Langone Health, the protesters were chanting, “Whose school? Our school!” and someone was screaming, “Safety!” They were angry, incredulous—many of the postdocs and researchers and faculty were waving posters that said things like, “WTF NYU” and “No to Sabatini!” They could not believe that this was going to happen.
They hadn’t read the lawyers’ report, but they had read the internet, and they didn’t like what they’d read. NYU was about to hire a “serial sexual harasser,” as one of the demonstrators put it, trading grant dollars for their trainees’ “safety.” So where should a superstar researcher do his research? Where does the guy who’s going to help cure cancer go? “Uhhh, Prison?” Madeleine Sutherland, a postdoc, told me...
“David is one of the greatest scientists of our century,” Bar-Sagi told me. Hoping to clear the way for Sabatini, and wary of not appearing insensitive to the Whitehead report’s findings, NYU was conducting its own investigation—“at the risk,” Bar-Sagi said, “of depriving society of the benefit of having someone like this continuing their career and making really meaningful discoveries that can affect human health for generations.”
NYU shared the Whitehead report with several outside lawyers, who all concluded that Sabatini was not afforded due process.
But the internal pressure, the bad press, and the tweets from within and without NYU were becoming too much. Postdocs at the medical school were threatening to retract papers. Faculty had been ostracized for not publicly blasting Sabatini. Andrew Hamilton, NYU’s president, sent a letter “strongly advising” that the medical school not go through with hiring Sabatini. “Faculty at the University and elsewhere have been told not to work with us. And also, speakers are being told not to come here,” an NYU administrator texted a colleague.
On May 3, NYU announced: “After careful and thorough consideration that included the perspectives of many stakeholders, both Dr. David Sabatini and NYU Grossman School of Medicine have reached the conclusion that it will not be possible for him to become a member of our faculty.”
“If people are close minded to the idea that there can be a consensual relationship between two adults, I’m afraid we can’t make any traction,” said Grossman, the dean of NYU Medical School. Neel, who would’ve become the second most famous cancer researcher at NYU had Sabatini been hired, tells me, “I find it all deeply disappointing and frightening.”
As if all this weren’t enough, the NIH started making noise. They’d gotten several anonymous complaints about Bar-Sagi. She has never had any complaint about her in her entire career. Her apparent crime appears to have been initiating the conversation with Sabatini.
Last week, NIH officials sent NYU a letter questioning Bar-Sagi’s ability to provide a safe environment for trainees. “It’s a pretty interesting message,” said Grossman. NIH also informed the university that it was auditing Bar-Sagi’s involvement in over $500 million in grant money that it had awarded to NYU. Most of that, $470 million, is for a study on long Covid...
He got some job offers, from China, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates—places that don’t care about the things he’s accused of...
One wonders whether the very rich people shoveling piles of money into these institutions have any idea about what’s going on within them.
At the protest, I met Tulsi Patel, a postdoc at Columbia. Patel tells me about a new bullying policy at Columbia, which she helped to write, to deal with “power-based harassment” that doesn’t fall into the already illegal categories like sex and race-based harassment. “We recommended calling it the Office of Conflict Resolution, just to make it sound like a chill thing, like it’s about resolving conflicts,” Patel said. The provost is reviewing the proposal.
Grossman, the dean of NYU’s medical school, talks a lot about, “listening to our community” and “believing in the process,” but the protestors don’t really care about any of that. They’re playing a different game. They know that if they make enough noise, if they claim enough “harm,” NYU— or any other school that brands itself as inclusive or progressive—will give in. And even if Sabatini were hired, no one would have worked with him. It would have been social suicide to.
Many of the researchers and postdocs I spoke to pointed out that, as scientists, it’s essential to look carefully at all the evidence and to leave no stone unturned. The way the Whitehead and MIT conducted their investigation into David Sabatini runs counter, they say, to the scientific method itself. It also sends a clear message: That ground-breaking research takes a backseat to an ideal of social purity, and that subjective truth is the only truth that matters.
“In my lab, there were two criteria we always strived toward; that the discovery is fundamentally true, which means proving it in many different ways, and that it’s new,” Sabatini said. “Everyone talks about your truth, and my truth. Physically, chemically, there’s only one truth.”"
From 2025 (he lost his lawsuit):
This Scientist Says MIT Ruined His Life. Now He’s Fighting for Redemption.
"He had been working in science for about 25 years without so much as a complaint...
He maintains to this day that he was a casualty of a “DEI-inspired purification of the institute.” He claims that his ouster was premeditated and that a diversity survey sent to Whitehead employees by an outside consulting firm, which only five or so of his lab members bothered to fill out, was used as a “cover-up” to tar him. The anonymous survey was designed to “collect data and comments on the culture across” Whitehead, according to minutes from a board meeting, but the students in Sabatini’s lab who took the survey told him they didn’t say anything negative about him. Nevertheless, Whitehead hired the law firm Hinckley, Allen & Snyder to conduct an investigation on his lab, following the survey...
The outcome could influence whether other people confront the institutions that they say unfairly smeared or fired them during the heyday of DEI. His case also offers a peek behind the curtain into elite universities’ workplace policies. What happened to Sabatini shows that scrubbing DEI initiatives isn’t as simple as shutting off the lights in those offices. “While I’m a supporter of increasing diversity in the sciences, in this case, DEI was abused and weaponized to achieve my destruction,” he told me...
In October 2020, Knouse told Ruth Lehmann about the harassment that she claimed to have suffered from Sabatini. Afterward, Knouse texted friends that the meeting with Lehmann went “SO WELL” and that it was “as if she wants a formal reason to fire him.” In other texts about her conversations with Lehmann, Knouse wrote, “now both angelika AND ruth agree that public outing is critical” and that “my case presents an ‘opportunity’ to show whitehead she’s no bullshit and no tolerance.”...
“Some people had sourdough bread as their pandemic project. Hers was to destroy me,” he said about Knouse.
Text messages disclosed as part of the legal battle show that Knouse and a graduate student in her own lab, Kristina Lopez, discussed how to respond to the anonymous survey. “Unleash on sharon jones,” Knouse texted, referring to the leader of Jones Diversity. Lopez replied: “Was going to consult you to see what you want me to say.” Knouse told her to “say anything and everything you want to.”
Nora Kory, who worked as a postdoc in Sabatini’s lab, texted Knouse about a conversation that Kory said she had with Lehmann. “She didn’t sound scared when I talked to her but was calmly thinking about how to do this best,” Kory wrote. She added: “(We came up with the idea of ‘covering the investigation up’ with the diversity survey).” Knouse responded, “This supports the notion that she has all along wanted to follow through on this but scared to do it without a smoking gun.”
According to text messages made public in the court fight, Knouse also texted about “playing whack a mole” with Sabatini’s “exit strategies,” including going to work in the biotech industry. Kory replied, “Ok, just about 20 other likely companies left. We’ll get them all though.”
Knouse also said, “It’s truly amazing what a handful of 30-something women committed to doing what’s right can accomplish.” Regarding the investigation, Knouse told Kory, “The initial process is all bound by confidentiality unless we’re unhappy with their decision at which point we can break the agreement and put it on the front page of the Globe,” a reference to The Boston Globe. Kory, who now has her own lab at Harvard’s public-health school, did not respond to my requests for comment. Before the investigation was finished, Zucker emailed, “If you shut this down today, I think we will just file and let the world decide what it thinks of all this.” The investigation was completed a few weeks later.
When Sabatini was finally gone, Knouse drank champagne with “two other women who came forward,” presumably Kory and Lopez, while watching the tweets “roll in.” In a text afterward, she said that it “felt like campaign headquarters after an election victory. Really special.”"
