Accumulating

 

During our three-day visit to Dallas last week I accumulated almost no nature photographs: it was a cultural trip that included hours at each of four museums. The only nature pictures I took were on our return, when we stopped at the rest area on Interstate 35 in Hill County. How could I pass up these (mostly) cumulus clouds?

 

 

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Two days ago I mentioned that Bari Weiss’s “Common Sense” blog celebrated the Fourth of July with the post “What We Love About America,” in which people, some of them immigrants, told what they love about America. One of those people was David Sabatini, a brilliant and successful cancer researcher who became a victim of the madness that swept through America in 2020 and hasn’t yet subsided. Suzy Weiss wrote about his plight in an article on May 19. Here’s how it begins:

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. “What wormhole did my life take, to billionaires and protests and being called a sexual predator? What quirk in the universe allowed this to happen?” Sabatini asked me.

 

   You can read the full article.

You can also watch a nine-minute video in which Suzy Weiss summarizes the David Sabatini story.

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman