David Sanders is an associate professor of biological sciences at Purdue University. He grew up in Teaneck, New Jersey, and then attended the Horace Mann School in Riverdale, New York. He received his Bachelor of Science degree from Yale College in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. He conducted his Ph.D. research in Biochemistry with Daniel E. Koshland, Jr., who was then editor of the journal Science, at the University of California at Berkeley. Sanders demonstrated that the response regulators in the two-component regulatory systems were phosphorylated on an aspartate residue and that they were protein phosphatases with a covalent intermediate. In 1995, he joined the Markey Center for Structural Biology at Purdue University. In 2016, Sanders was elected to the West Lafayette City Council. He has opposed the plan to divert hundreds of millions of gallons of water from Tippecanoe County aquifers to the LEAP project in Boone County, and he sponsored the West Lafayette City Council resolution opposing the pipeline.
Scientific career
Research
He originated the idea of the "Molecule of the Year" feature in Science. He was a visiting scientist at the University of California at San Francisco, and then a postdoctoral fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, which is affiliated with MIT. It was there that he began his studies on the entry of viruses into cells with a focus on the inhibition of infection and applications to gene therapy.
He joined the Markey Center for Structural Biology at Purdue University in 1995, where he was the leader of the Molecular Virology program and also a member of the Cancer Center. He was the discoverer of a biochemical reaction, thiol-disulfide exchange, that leads to the entry of cancer-causing retroviruses into cells. He also is the primary inventor on two U.S. patents on novel gene-therapy delivery techniques.
His work on the Ebola virus led to his participation in the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency's Biological Weapons Proliferation Prevention Program, a product of the Nunn-Lugar legislation. His responsibilities included inspecting the Vector laboratory in Siberia, which was the site of biological-weapons development in the era of the Soviet Union. He has investigated the transmission of viruses from other animals, especially birds, to humans and has been invited to speak on ethics, biodefense, evolution, gene therapy, vaccination and influenza viruses in public forums including regular interviews on WIBC in Indianapolis,
He is a recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award for his work on an enzyme that is involved in production of the greenhouse gas and potential energy source, methane He is also an American Cancer Society Research Scholar. In 2003 he conducted his sabbatical research at the Weizmann Institute in Israel.
Sanders has been a vocal critic of the Science article authored by Felisa Wolfe-Simon and Paul Davies in which the discovery of arsenic-based life is claimed. Sanders has argued that the original Science article on the arsenic bacteria should be retracted on the basis that the data in the paper were misrepresented in the article.
Sanders's work on the Ebola virus led to media interviews during the 2014 Ebola virus disease outbreak in Western Africa. He declared that there was little risk on infection for the individual American and asserted that the panic about the virus could be worse than the disease in the United States. He was an early advocate of focusing on regional centers as places for treatment of Ebola virus victims in the United States and asserted that patients should share their travel history whenever they meet with a medical provider, stating, "If you go to South America or East Asia there is a different ensemble of possible diseases associated with a set of symptoms, and the physician won't necessarily think about them if he isn't aware of where you've been traveling recently." He opposed mandatory quarantines for asymptomatic patients that may have been exposed to Ebola virus. Sanders wrote an article about his experience with the media including an encounter with Karl Rove.
During the Coronavirus disease 2019 outbreak Sanders has been interviewed about the science behind public policy. He was reported to have criticized President Donald Trump for touting the use of chloroquine as a treatment for Coronavirus disease 2019.
An article by Sanders was featured among a collection about keeping up with the contemporary academic literature. He has also described new approaches to developing the literary skills of graduate students in the sciences and rubrics for how to write (and how not to write) a scientific review article.