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Today’s blacklisted American: Scientist destroyed because he dated a co-worker

David Sabatini: Scientist blacklisted

Persecution is now cool! The career and work of a world-renowned molecular biologist scientist David Sabatini has been utterly destroyed because of unproven accusations against him from a co-worker whom he had been casually dating for a short time.

The story at the link is long and detailed, and utterly horrifying. Not only did Ruth Lehmann, the head of the the Whitehead Institute where Sabatini worked and who fired him, never talk to him face-to-face, the report she based her actions on was filled with hearsay and unsubstantiated accusations.

No matter. Sabatini had been accused of sexual harassment, and thus he must be destroyed, without due process or any fair trial.

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.”

According to the vast majority of people who worked with Sabatini, the report had nothing to do with reality and was shaped to slander him, regardless of facts. Consider this quote from the report itself:

“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.” [emphasis mine]

The first highlighted phrase illustrates the focus on sexual politics. Women scientists are incapable of handling a focus on “science above all else”, and thus must be coddled. The second highlighted phrase proves the real goal here: The wielding of power and the intimidation of anyone who might dissent from that power-wielding.

Under such conditions, true scientific research is impossible. Researchers will be forever afraid to contradict their superiors, even when their scientific results are fraudulent, out of fear.

Please read the whole article at the link. This story is in many ways one of the most depressing blacklist stories I have covered in the past year and half. A good scientist has been destroyed, because of petty sexual politics that have nothing to do with science or decent human behavior. Worse, he is blacklisted so thoroughly that any attempt to rehire him results in protests, investigations, and an effort to destroy those who even considered such a thing.

Meanwhile, the field of molecular biology and cancer research will decline, led by petty dictators whose grasp of the truth is weak, at best.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


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"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

17 comments

  • Col Beausabre

    This reminds me of the “Satanic Cult” frenzy of the Eighties, where lives were destroyed based on bogus “research” and an attitude of “believe the children, they would never lie or respond to leading questions”
    – chillingly familiar with the “always believe the woman” attitude so prevalent today.

    “The Satanic panic is a moral panic consisting of over 12,000 unsubstantiated cases of Satanic ritual abuse (SRA, sometimes known as ritual abuse, ritualistic abuse, organized abuse, or sadistic ritual abuse) starting in the United States in the 1980s, spreading throughout many parts of the world by the late 1990s, and persisting today. The panic originated in 1980 with the publication of Michelle Remembers, a book co-written by Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and his patient (and future wife), Michelle Smith, which used the discredited practice of recovered-memory therapy to make sweeping lurid claims about satanic ritual abuse involving Smith. The allegations which afterwards arose throughout much of the United States involved reports of physical and sexual abuse of people in the context of occult or Satanic rituals.

    The second group to make allegations of SRA were young children. During the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s, the techniques used by investigators to gather evidence from witnesses, particularly young children, evolved to become very leading, coercive and suggestive, pressuring young children to provide testimony and refusing to accept denials while offering inducements that encouraged false disclosures. The interviewing techniques used were the factors believed to have led to the construction of the bizarre disclosures of SRA by the children and changes to forensic and interviewing techniques since that time has resulted in a disappearance of the allegations. Analysis of the techniques used in two key cases (the McMartin preschool and Wee Care Nursery School trials) concluded that the children were questioned in a highly suggestive manner. Compared with a set of interviews from Child Protective Services, the interviews from the two trials were “significantly more likely to (a) introduce new suggestive information into the interview, (b) provide praise, promises, and positive reinforcement, (c) express disapproval, disbelief, or disagreement with children, (d) exert conformity pressure, and (e) invite children to pretend or speculate about supposed events.

    Scholarly interest in the topic slowly built, eventually resulting in the conclusion that the phenomenon was a moral panic, which, as one researcher put it in 2017, “involved hundreds of accusations that devil-worshipping paedophiles were operating America’s white middle-class suburban daycare centers.

    Of the more than 12,000 documented accusations nationwide, investigating police were not able to substantiate any allegations of organized cult abuse”

  • pzatchok

    “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.

    Isn’t this what all collage professors and industry bosses do?

    Why would you hire someone who didn’t mirror you or how you worked? Having people diametrically opposed to you working for you in any way is like hiring someone to sandbag you.

    I would take this to court and huge cash and counter sue everyone including the woman who raised the complaints and the person who listened to her and only her.

    I tell every coworker I have to NEVER fish in the company pond. No matter what. No matter who, No matter how nice they are today.
    Compliment no one, ever. Unless its only on work performance, never on looks no matter what. Never touch them unless its to pull them out of a death trap. And in most cases only after you ask permission.

    And never mention religion. In any form at any time.

    I actually had to tell a lesbian co worker to stop telling hetero jokes. She thought I was kidding around until I told her that even though I didn’t care one whit about it someone else might take it wrong and obviously she would not like if the shoe was on the other foot. She did eventually get fired to sexual harassment of another lesbian she dated and broke up with.

    Don’t dip you pen in the company inkwell.

  • pzatchok

    Men, especially white men, need to be extra careful.
    We can not make any missteps in the workplace. Any.

    And watch what you say in public places. There is a Karen out there looking to take you down. Don’t give her a chance.

  • Steve Richter

    Obviously terrible. Where are the conservatives with a few hundred million to spare who are willing to fund new colleges and universities? Plenty of defrocked professors available who could teach. Demand that the students attend classes and expel those who play the cancel culture card.

  • “Men, especially white men, need to be extra careful.
    We can not make any missteps in the workplace. Any.”

    Oh, I don’t know. There may be a lot of men who aren’t looking for trouble, but if trouble comes along, it will wish it hadn’t.

  • pzatchok

    Blair

    If your woke female boss takes a dislike to you or even just feels like a woman should be in your job what are you going to do about?

    She has full power to fire you for any reason. and if she needs one she can find one.

    Wasn’t it you that said that hateful thing during lunch a few months ago? Well we think you have gone too far and will be letting you go.

    Men used to finish any real argument out in the parking lot after work. Then forget about and buy each other a drink.
    The woke culture never forgets and fights nasty.

  • “If your woke female boss takes a dislike to you or even just feels like a woman should be in your job what are you going to do about?”

    Quit. She won’t find anyone as good as I am. Then, baby, meet my lawyer.

    I really can’t speak to that scenario, as I own my own shop. I have refused work from people that were a little too ‘woke’.

  • Tfourier

    This Ruth Lehmann person looks like one of those everything woke people. Politicizes everything. Add to that she sounds like one of those academic politics sharks. The research institute director from hell.

    Here is an supposedly purely scientific work interview. Woke politics gets pulled in multiple times. No relevance to the science involved. None. But she mentions pretty much every woke buzzword. Almost perfect Buzzword Bingo score.

    https://www.journals.elsevier.com/cells-and-development/interviews/an-interview-with-dr-ruth-lehmann

  • Dan Hughes

    wow ! 143,477 citations to his peer-reviewed publications.

    https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=gi0NNjgAAAAJ&view_op=list_works

  • Phil Berardelli

    Sue the b*st*rds.

  • GWB

    pzatchok
    June 14, 2022 at 5:55 pm
    I would take this to court and huge cash and counter sue everyone including the woman who raised the complaints and the person who listened to her and only her.

    This. If they just fire you, you probably don’t have action (in an employment at will state). But they blacklisted this guy. That’s defamation. Period.

    Even when I’ve had a co-worker fired for cause, they’ve never been publicly shamed, never had the team told “Yeah, s/he/it was a lazy worker.” It was always, officially, something like “S/he/it didn’t work out.” Scuttlebutt might say otherwise, but never from bosses to workers, in a dang memo.

  • John Potter

    I’m going to put on my conspiracy hat today and look a little more closely at this. If you review Sabatini’s work you’ll notice it has to do with mTOR signaling. Well, there is an article out already entitled mTOR inhibition and p53 activation, microRNAs: The possible therapy against pandemic COVID-19.

    Unfortunately, the spike protein in vaccines deactivates p53 – which is why there are so many cancers out there after getting vaccinated (which true believers will never admit), Not hard to make the leap that a vaccine maker felt threatened by his research. While so may think that plausible but not probable- I say follow the money.

  • Charity

    There is no such thing as a “casual date” on an American campus! Males on campus at all levels, from cleaners to renowned tenured professors, would be well-advised to avoid all casual contact with any female at any level. This MIT researcher did not get the memo, and got it good and hard. Not. Very. Smart.

  • Cotour

    RELATED, ITS ALL RELATED

    “5 term incumbent, South Carolina Rep. Tom Rice loses House seat after voting to impeach Trump”

    So far 129 of Trump endorsed candidates going into the 2022 elections have won, with 8 losses. (You cannot ignore the numbers.)

    And that is a very strong indicator of what is coming in the 2022 midterm elections. All are forced to reveal themselves

    (If the midterm elections are allowed that is, you know with all of the “Domestic Terrorism” and the “Monkeypox” in America that is)

    If Trump, or someone who has a similar philosophy wins, America wins. Period!

    https://ecp.yusercontent.com/mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimg1.etsystatic.com%2F114%2F0%2F7061581%2Fil_570xN.984668747_cm28.jpg&t=1655306859&ymreqid=dc7face7-d905-7706-2f2c-5a08df012200&sig=pIGr7morNcDUyxxh3XC6_Q–~D

  • Alton

    Steve Richter

    “????? ??? ??? ????????????? ???? ? ??? ??????? ??????? ?? ????? ??? ??? ??????? ?? ???? ??? ???????? ??? ?????????????”

    Well two Points:

    Well over five dozen Foundations have been created by Conservatives that first Built large businesses, that could produce Profits, then as a portion of their ‘Give Backs’ to the community and country that Allowed them to fulfill their dreams. Thereby gave jobs which made it Possible for tens of millions of the common man to raise families and send their children to the Great Universities of the land…..

    They have Now Been CAPTURED.

    Example The Ford Foundation, created by a top industrialist, and Conservative of his day,(yes he had some weird beliefs too) has the largest Endowment in the land. Ford Foundation was the ring leader in getting 50 plus Foundations together and start Funding BLM with it’s first $106 million…followed by at least $250 million more (Total raised according to one report $2 Billion).

    The left began their Long March (thanks Chairman Mao) through America’$ Institutions decades & decades ago, thus capturing multiple ?️ Mountains of dough……

    Next:

    Many of our 4,000 Colleges were started by Christians and their funds, added over the centuries by even larger amounts of resources from the Conservatives who helped build the greatest Economy on the Planet.

    These have been captured also by the left, massively.

    When you start a foundation or a college how do you keep the filthy fingers of Leftists off the institution once you are Dead and Buried.

    Examples the Reagan Foundation has now been taken over by the RINO establishment wing of the Party.

    Small Business Chamber of Commerce is now led
    “by liberal ideologue Frank Knap”
    “Unfortunately, Knapp’s group rarely embraces pro-small business positions. In fact, more often than not it seems to be serving as a vehicle for policies which would actually harm these businesses – or for policies that have next-to-nothing to do with the economic challenges these businesses are facing.”

    Sir if you can find a means to keep funds and power out of the Leftists hands for more than a few years, you can become Rich… Hundreds of persons out in the land will beat the grass bare coming to your Office.

    O’Sullivan’s Law:

    O’Sullivan’s Law states that any organization or enterprise that is not expressly right wing will become left wing over time. The law is named after British journalist John O’Sullivan.

    $ource: Urban Dictionary

    One article cited:

    https://www.fitsnews.com/2021/08/23/why-is-south-carolinas-small-business-chamber-pushing-the-national-liberal-agenda/

    Note: I a life long Republican from a GOP family back to 1859, was once a Member of the Sierra Club and the WWF, left in the 90s.

  • sippin_bourbon

    “Never be alone with a woman that is no your wife.”
    It was a rule I heard when I was younger.
    When I was a wild, young, and single college kid, I may broke that rule a bit.

    But as an adult, and now happily married man, I stick to it.

    If I am alone with women, for work or even social reasons, it is in public areas, where we can be seen and heard by others.
    I have never even gone to lunch alone with another woman since entering the professional world.

    It protects the lady, it protects me. It also protects me from myself. It protects me from the very few bat feces crazy women out there. If, professionally, I ever had to counsel a female, it was in the presence of others, or with the door wide open. One tried to close the door, to make us alone, and I immediately told her to re-open it. In one situation, where I was worried she might try to say something that could be taken wrong, or later make an accusation (she was already under an investigation for other issues), I recorded the meeting. It sounds paranoid, but I have seen others accused. I do not know if they were legit accusations or not, but I simply made sure I would not be next.

    Beyond that, on the rare and random occasion where a woman has been flirtatious with me, the first thing I do after polite extrication, is tell my wife about it. 100% of the time. The result is that I have never been accused of anything and my wife trusts me completely.

    One cannot be too careful.

  • Alton

    Sir Sippin

    No not to far out…
    They now sell writing pens that records sound and HD video — flash drives that also do the dirty deed..

    And very many other useful items….
    Even on Amazon.

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