An interview with David Sabatini

Abstract

David Sabatini is a Member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Senior Associate Member at The Broad Institute Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as a Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. David and his laboratory at the Whitehead Institute study the basic mechanisms that regulate cell growth, the process whereby cells and organisms accumulate mass and increase in size. These pathways are often deranged in human diseases, such as diabetes and cancer. A major focus of the laboratory is on a cellular system called the target of rapamycin (TOR) pathway, a major regulator of growth in many eukaryotic species. Work in David’s laboratory has led to the identification of many components of the pathway and to an understanding of their cellular and organismal functions. David is also interested in the role of metabolism in cancer and in the mechanisms that control the effects of dietary restriction on tumorigenesis. In addition to the work on growth control and cancer, David’s laboratory has developed and is using new technologies that facilitate the analysis of gene function in mammalian cells. The laboratory developed ‘cell-based microarrays’ that allow one to examine the cellular effects of perturbing the activity of thousands of genes in parallel. David is a founding member of The RNAi Consortium (TRC) of laboratories in the Boston area that is developing and using genome-scale RNA interference (RNAi) libraries targeting human and mouse genes. David received his BS from Brown University magna cum laude and his MD/PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1997. He completed his thesis work in the laboratory of Dr Solomon H. Snyder in the Department of Neuroscience. Later in the same year, David was appointed a Whitehead Fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. This was followed in 2002 by a dual appointment as a Member at the Whitehead Institute and Assistant Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. David has received numerous distinctions, including being named a W.M. Keck Foundation Distinguished Young Scholar, a Pew Scholar, a TR100 Innovator, a recipient of the 2009 Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research, The 2012 Earl and Thressa Stadtman Scholar Award from The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB), and most recently the 2013 Feodor Lynen Award from Nature. Did you always want to be a scientist? No, not really. Despite my father being a cell biologist and my mother a pathologist, I did not decide on science as a career until I was in college at Brown and I worked in Al Dahlberg’s laboratory on ribosomal RNA in bacteria. It was there that I fell in love with the laboratory atmosphere and the feeling of freedom of just following my curiosity. Earlier I had wanted to be an architect (although I showed no particular skill and my parents told me I would end up designing bathrooms for condos).