Behind Every Successful Woman ...
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.
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.
Labels: COVID-19, Research, United Kingdom
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