I somehow missed the thread a few months back[1], but this article is woefully one-sided.

- As someone who worked in cancer bio and shared a campus with Sabatini, his sexual conduct was always a bit borderline and there were rumors floating about him well before Knouse came forward. It's strange to me that Weiss did not interview any of those people or anyone who could speak to those rumors. It's important to note that Knouse was only one of multiple accusers.

- Perhaps an even more glaring omission, however, is that the article repeatedly bragged about Sabatini's publication record without any mention of the series of controversies he had BEFORE the sexual harassment controversy. Several high-profile papers from the Sabatini lab were found to have fraudulent data and manipulated figures [2]. Some of these "mistakes" would have been career-ending to a student or postdoc in a smaller lab, but since it's the Sabatini lab, well, "it doesn't change the conclusions of the paper".

We can certainly speculate about whether or not Knouse had ulterior motives and whether or not Sabatini really got due process in the court of public opinion. There's definitely some perverted social and institutional processes at play here. However, omitting the two points above make me question this article's motivations.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31436202 2. https://forbetterscience.com/2020/01/29/david-sabatini-torme...

This is very clearly a one-sided propaganda piece written to minimize Sabatini's misdeeds. It even tries to "slut-ify" (for the lack of a better word) the person he sexually abused with statements like

> 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.

Even if you know nothing about it, do know that big and powerful institutions like MIT have investigated him and decided it's not worth their while keeping him around, and it's not just for the "wokeness".

> “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.

In the best case, it's just men in the position of power unable to see that women's panties do not drop at the moment's notice because of their "world class research position", and unable to see how their abuse of power can hurt others. In the worst case, it's predators using their power to destroy lives. Either way, he has no business supervising anybody.

Hey a doctor can be unemployed just like everybody else, collecting unemployment, no shame in that, just down on his luck.

People insist it be automatic you get your MD you're set for life, with no caveats. Nah, man, it's just a degree, just means you don't get persecuted with an absurd level of aggression for helping people. Anybody can get fired, anybody can quit, some people say you can't quit the word to quit doesn't start with a letter q. And then you don't have a job, but you saved up right? Not since the Reagan era? Or the mortgage, wait you sign whatever people put in front of you, get a mortgage which everybody says is slavery and the Bible shits on absolutely every single time, you fell for that? Like that doctor on TV the Brazilian plastic surgeon, Dr. Rey that's him, like it's TV but that means idiots actually do those things, idiot doctors, like too a bridge loan two mortgages, that expensive wife and expensive daughter, like the daughter knew "Gucci" age 2, they're lying about lying about that, they fucked up and told the truth.

Let me say all the algorithms in medicine are clever first approximations, only 2 of the 18 best were truly close to the mark. Bioinformatics is in its infancy still.

He can get a job again, hell he could keep buying pens and notebooks and keep being a cancer researcher with that unemployment benefit. The algorithm research is the cheapest thing to do, like you can talk a library into giving pen and paper to you for free.

Great ideas come on an empty stomach.

"Fellow" commenters: Disliking the implications of what some piece of information being true entails doesn't make it propaganda. You are criticising it not because you are intellectually honest, but because you see it as an allegiance with an imaginary "enemy tribe".

Bad actors are despicable, good actors are warriors & everyone else may as well just be bad. The brain drain from the mob's media vigilantiism will be crippling to entire industries, countries, the world. As a species throughout history, we have undoubtably missed value via discrimination. The solution going forward is about inclusivity and tolerance, not more hate & discrimination.