Mean Streets, Mean Lab

Joel B. Levine MD

Two terrible stories, two terrible outcomes. But as with all truth, there is appearance and reality. What happened is often easy to say. In the one, a cluster of street cops, aka, Scorpion Unit, beat a young Black man who subsequently died. In the other, a once in a generation scientist was fired from his august lab at MIT for violating the rules of university and the contemporaneous rules about men and women in the workplace.

But like most tragedies, they mean different things to different people. In the first response, cruel men, violent men, beat a man for no apparent reason. These men were police. In the first response, a privileged man, misused his position to coerce a woman into a relationship. More to the point, it was a power-based betrayal of a trust, a lab that was a petri dish for “frat boy” abuse of women.

I suspect both stories will be etched into a stone of their own. Our society loves to expiate its real deficiencies by public executions. It puts the politics on a boil, gins up the donors, and sells a lot of tee shirts.

There is always, however, a back story, a context, and, even, a deeper truth. These are sad outcomes but are far closer to being fruits from poisoned trees that we were not likely to be forced to think about.

The Atlantic magazine wrote compellingly about the descent of the city of Memphis into criminalityhttps://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/memphis-violence-reduction-murder-crime-rate-policing/671877/ At the end of this story, a very affecting one, we learn two essential facts of urban life. First that living amidst drugs and violence is so corrosive that civil society itself is in peril. Second, that all the efforts ,historically tried, just failed. Failure makes everyone desperate. This was the context that created the “Scorpion” unit.

At about the same time, as if from another galaxy, the Memphis police were being “reimagined” by the Mayors Task Force Report. To really set the stage, https://reimagine.memphistn.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/70/2021/03/Reimagining_Police_Findings_Book_Final.pdf illuminates the centrifugal forces pulling the system apart. The thematic necessity was the “excessive force” perspective having been inseminated by the George Floyd death. It envisioned a kinder, gentler, more diverse, more, well, peaceful. Less police, more safety.

What is painfully evident, quoted deep in the text of the report, are the responses of the police themselves burdened at both ends of their watch. No longer the paladins of the society, they are cast forth into a cauldron that none but the residents of Memphis understand. Clearly, the police leave afraid, in the morning, and return afraid at night. The only difference is what they are afraid of in each direction.

One of the reasons combat soldiers rarely speak of war is what war imposes. To survive, you suspend boundaries, to embrace maximum incivility you learn to be blind to compassion. Yes, there are dramatic exceptions, often in the movies, but in hell, angels have the half-life of a glider pilot.

So in Memphis, a cluster of police, beat a man. One of the street mantas, disavowed in this case, was never resist arrest. Putting aside the yet unexplained reason why he was initially stopped and “pulled” from the car, he violated their street coda. And so, they beat him with fists, feet, and baton. On the streets, beatings are sadly a currency. Here, a young man, hardly a thug in appearance, was perceived as a breaker of the rule of respect. Did they meant to kill him? Likely not as the weapons would have been different. What starts one way, can finish another.

When the paramedics and others came, the scene was made for Dinero. Listen to their banter, a punk violator of their authority and they meted out just punishment. All seemed to agree. Just another beating on “street rules” Cops who, being defined by the “Reimagining”, had then redefined themselves as the unappreciated and disrespected “last barriers”.

What they did not know was the Tyler was not your typical “street “hood but a young man with Crohn’s Disease. What was his state of health”? What medications was he taking, including blood thinners. The preliminary report says he died from excessive bleeding. Did he bleed into his brain or lung from the beating? We will eventually find out. The only difference in this beating from scores of others would be the “unintended” outcome.

We had a city that was in turmoil from murder and drugs. It needed a level of professionalism and dedication that would be hard to achieve even in a 1950’s “cops as heroes’ culture. Newly hired police were not vetted by prior standards to achieve a racial rebalancing in a minority city. The “reimagining “report, as such always do, left a “they do not know what we go through “cops’ message on the windshield. Bad and tragic outcomes always follow the misadventure of a poorly understood problem and a reactive press for “acceptable “solutions. In the past, a letter took a week. Now, instantly, what we see, or read, or hear, is all there is.

Rather than end this first narrative, the last sentence is introduction to the second.

This brings me to the mean streets of MIT. There was a recent two-part series by the Spotlight Team of the Boston Globe. This is the group that exposed the problems with pedophiles within the Boston Church. In the new reveal, a generational, Nobel level, biologist was tossed from the high academic tower. The proximate cause was a forbidden consensual relationship with a member of his lab. The woman was far more colleague than subordinate. She was a willing comrade in arms until he cooled and had interest in another woman. Both knew, at some brainstem level, that MIT had just announced a ban on human chemistry. Any attraction, of whatever type or expression, was now the stuff of summary execution. But, such a draconian edict was gossamer when it came to a shared passion(s) for whiskey, science, and, on a few occasions over several years, each other.

Fortunately, we have an email string that lacks only the cleverness of Ferris Bueller. It is sophomoric, as she wants more, he less. Alas, the soap opera second act. In a fevered exchange, he, the forever male, said “she was crazy” not to just go back to his/her test tubes. That was old school, for sure, and, as in a Stacy Abrams novel, she awoke, with a little help from her friends, to what a “frat boy “David is, and always, was. No matter the past, a new alchemy turned mentorship into malevolence and collegiality into grooming. Time to tell the world, starting with MIT, about this ego flushed man who, despite great achievement, was a gargoyle that just had to go.

If I am sounding a bit unsympathetic, I am. Not that men cannot be awful, not that women cannot be mercilessly vindictive, but what was quite normal human folly deprived the rest of us from advances in neurodegenerative disease. Sabatini would have trained and ignited a next generation whose contributions would have likely surpassed his own.

What did Sabatini actually do? Well, he had an on and off relationship with a woman in his lab. She was full bore, and their emails were Harry and Sally. But he cooled and was otherwhere drawn. As his life was his lab, his love life was likely his lab as well. This was his universe and, as in any closed shop filled with interesting and attractive people, the bees find ready flowers.

I should note, and with some interest, that not all the folks in the lab thought him a bad version of Rhett Butler. There was a sentence or two that hinted that the loss of his mentorship, their ongoing research, this black mark on their records, the loss of income and or NIH funds, might be a bit of collateral, unless it is something like having your clothes catch on fire when you get too close to the cross burning.

But it gets even more unfathomable. The word seems a bit much until you get the lord of the files part of this. Sabatini’s father was a Professor at New York University. The administration, to its credit, believed that MIT had not acted with due process and the punishment was “disproportionate, as in the considered distinction between beheading and being drawn and quartered. To that end, they offered David a position, non- tenured, which is as far from a fall as any “endowed” Professor could experience. But it was a start over, and all might be both wiser and chastened.

But, this version of a corona virus, small “c” this time, found roost in New York as surely as in Cambridge. As best as I can gather, the Easy Pass detectors on the Mass Pike picked up that David was headed south. By the time he got to the Bronx, corona sensors flashed on untold phones. Students took to the barricades, Les Miserable in every way, and promised days of hormonal rage should this “man” get any closer than an East Village Shake Shack. The offer was withdrawn.

None one can say that Frank did not have it right. “If you can make it in New York “, or, as it this case “not”, you cannot make it anywhere.

The Globe had a photo or two of the labs when all were just under the illusion that this was the best thing that will ever happen to them in their lives, even for these two. What is remarkable is the memorialized colloquy between the “always” colleagues, “mostly” friends, and “occasional” lovers. Both quite ordinary people aside from their gifts. Both still adolescent as perpetual schooling will allow. Both trying the best they could to do a complex and demanding thing, to unravel intensely complex biology. Perfect people, no. Fully mature, no. Sophisticated as in France as to matters of heart and below, hardly.

Memphis and MIT do not share much. Both misunderstood their problems and applied poorly aligned solutions. Broken cops, broken by mean streets. Mean streets because there is profit for someone, in some currency, to keep them so. Broken scientists broken by a collective immaturity that has changed academic and institutional life in the United States. Two consequential failures, sharing a true lack of compassion, connected by the arrogance that imposes a chosen political or social belief even when the body count continues to rise.

As I final edit this, i have learned about private funding for a new Sabatini lab. Yes, but when you are excommunicated, body and soul, having a friend build you a private church in your backyard is not quite the same.