Politic?: Behind Every Successful Woman

© Joe Cummings

"My husband has taken on all the shopping and cooking responsibilities. I just go home and sit down and there's food there. I wouldn't have the energy to cook anything myself."
"We didn't get any information about Oxford at my school. It was a completely different world. At the time there was a separate applications system but only the daughters of the local MP and the surgeon got to know about it. The rest of us were completely oblivious."
"In the future there will be another 'Disease X' to respond to, and then another and so on."
"This is what I've been thinking about and planning for. It is really great to be implementing these things and have the funding, finally, to do it and move at the speed we know we can move at."
"We're all very familiar with IT security."
"It is very similar to viruses found in animals. That is where it came from. This happens repeatedly. This is where we get disease from. Zoonotic transmission is where emerging pathogens start and it happens a lot."
"There does need to be more done to stop the spread of misinformation. When you start to unpick the objections people have to vaccines, a lot of it doesn't make any sense."
"Too many people reject them out of hand. They say these vaccines are being developed too quickly and won't be safe but that doesn't follow. Just because it normally takes ten years to develop a vaccine that is mostly about funding and procedure. We know about the safety of all this technology. This is a different approach to vaccinations -- it doesn't have to be slow."
"What we haven't done much before is giving second dose of vaccine and seeing antibody responses get even stronger. We don't know what level we need to get to protect people against this virus. We can't say what antibody level is needed -- nobody knows."
"We're not competing with the other vaccines because we need more than one vaccine for the world."
Professor Sarah Gilbert, professor of vaccinology, Jenner Institute, Oxford University

Devoted to her work, Dr.Gilbert doesn't seek the limelight. "It's not my natural instinct to stick my head above the parapet. I don't want to be a celebrity. I just want to get the work done", she explains. The work she alludes to is critical to the world community assailed repeatedly by the onset and proliferation of ever deadlier zoonotics; viruses that have managed to make the leap from animals to transmit to humans. Often in their host animals the viruses are not deadly; long association has geared animals' immune systems to deal with the presence of the virus; introduced to human hosts, measured resistance is absent.

And the human immune response can be sufficiently dramatic to become out of control, an overwrought and over-responsive immune system causing massive immune responses with bodily organs going completely off kilter resulting from galloping inflammation that can ultimately destroy the body's organs, causing death. Dr.Gilbert's work is that of a developer of new vaccines to respond to the constantly emerging pathogens threatening to overwhelm the world community of mass humanity.

She has worked on Lassa fever, Nipah and Middle East Respiratory syndrome (MERS), developing for that coronavirus a vaccine that combined a gene from the virus along with a chimpanzee adenovirus where the vaccine operates as a "Trojan horse", tricking the human cells to produce a more moderate, effective immune response. This is the same formula she has used to develop Oxford's COVID-19 vaccine. A vaccine whose initial results were just published in The Lancet medical journal, confirming it to be safe and effective in producing an immune response to COVID.

Dr.Gilbert and her research team have succeeded in producing a vaccine whose process under normal circumstances can take years to develop, rather than the months -- since January to the present -- to achieve their initial success. Theirs is the first vaccine of the countless others being developed all over the world, to reach this stage of development, awaiting further trials and ultimately approval and production, leading to dissemination and public inoculation.

The phase 1 trial used volunteers to test the efficacy and safety of the new vaccine. Among those volunteers were Dr.Gilbert's 21-year-old triplets, all three of whom happen to be biochemistry students. Typically, Dr.Gilbert doesn't see too much of her family these days. Rising around 4:00 a.m. daily she cycles the short distance to the laboratory, returning home around 8:00 p.m., exhausted. When she and her husband moved 26 years ago to Oxford, it was for her to be able to take a senior post-doctoral position at the Jenner Institute.

relates to Covid Vaccine Front-Runner Is Months Ahead of Her Competition

Dr.Gilbert in her lab, pre-Covid and pre-fame.

Photographer: John Lawrence/Shutterstock

Enabling that situation meant that her husband left his own career in science to work for Oxford University Press, in publishing. When their triplets were born, nursery fees absorbed her entire income. A mutual agreement meant her husband would sacrifice his own career to devote himself to the care of their children. She never dreamed, despite an attraction to science, that she might one day study at Oxford, much less take up her professional career there, where two of her children are themselves now studying.

The world's attention has turned in the past week to Oxford University and the work of Dr.Gilbert and her research associates. Efforts have been made to hack into their vaccine development program. Dr.Gilbert admits to being targeted with phishing emails and once herself inadvertently opened an attachment realizing immediately afterward a virus had infected her computer necessitating that it be "completely wiped" by university technicians to protect the contents from exploitation in a lapse of cyber security.

This week, a poll was released revealing that of 2,00 people queried across the U.K. 14 percent claimed they would refuse a vaccination for COVID-19. U.S. polls have found that refusal figure as high as fifty percent, with experts estimating any vaccine would have to be accepted by 70 percent of a population to ensure it is effective across a targeted population. Dr.Gilbert doesn't agree with compulsory vaccination, hoping that education will convince more people of the necessity to vaccinate to protect an entire population.

She is uncertain with respect to which most vulnerable group in a population should logically receive the vaccine first, once it becomes available. Much will hinge on what happens during the coming winter, she feels. When a second wave is "quite likely" on the horizon. "Pandemics come in waves. they don't just come once and disappear", she said.