Sarah Gilbert > Quotes

“You've got to be smart enough to write and stupid enough not to think about all the things that might go wrong.”
― Sarah Gilbert

“Imagine that. You just can't let your entire life go by worrying about your damned thighs. You'd never find happiness.”
― Sarah Gilbert, Summer Gloves

“In September 2020, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. She had been a liberal judge on the US Supreme Court, and her death gave President Trump the opportunity to nominate an anti-abortion member of the religious right as her replacement. I am not going to say that abortion is a good thing, but it is sometimes a necessary thing and in a free society a woman should be able to choose if she is going to have an abortion or not. In an ideal world, it would not be necessary for very many abortions ever to be carried out. So an ideal world is what legislators should be looking to create if they want to reduce the number of abortions.”
― Sarah Gilbert, Vaxxers: A Pioneering Moment in Scientific History

“(To be honest, handshakes had caused me problems in the past and I would not be sorry if they were a permanent casualty of this pandemic.”
― Sarah Gilbert, Vaxxers: A Pioneering Moment in Scientific History

“It is true that vaccines have in the past taken a long, long time to develop. Until 2020, a new vaccine usually took at least ten years to develop from concept to roll-out. Many took much longer. The malaria vaccine programme at the Jenner Institute has been going for twenty-five years, and research into malaria vaccines had been going on for more than a hundred years – so far, with limited success. The lab-to-jab record-holder was the mumps vaccine, developed in four years by Maurice Hilleman in the United States in the 1960s.1 But the standard lengthy timeline we were all used to was never because vaccine development required ten, fifteen or thirty years of continuous painstaking lab work, clinical trials and data analysis. For every vaccine that had ever been developed up until 2020, most of the elapsed development time was spent waiting. In 2020, there were three key factors that enabled us to cut out the waiting and crunch ten years into one: first, the work we had already done; second, changes to the way funding was given out; and third, doing in parallel things that we would normally do in sequence.”
― Sarah Gilbert, Vaxxers: A Pioneering Moment in Scientific History