Charles Sabine OBE is an Emmy Award winning television journalist and a global spokesman for patients and families suffering degenerative brain diseases. He is active throughout advocacy and charity sectors across four continents and founder of the Hidden No More Foundation.
Sabine joined NBC in 1982 in London, and worked as a writer at ‘30 Rock’ in Manhattan, New York, in 1987. He then transitioned to field production in conflicts and according to NBC Universal, “Sabine participated in most of the major international news stories of the next two decades”.
As producer of the NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw’s team coverage of the Romanian Revolution, Sabine received an Emmy Award for his program segments which aired in December 1989, in the Outstanding General Coverage of a Single–Breaking News Story category of the News & Documentary Emmy Awards.
During his time in the field, Sabine conducted three tours on CVN-71 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers at battle stations, USS George Washington (the Adriatic), the USS Theodore Roosevelt (Mediterranean) and the USS Enterprise (Arabian Sea).
He was the last western journalist to interview the founder of Hamas, Sheik Ahmed Yassin in a secret location in Gaza.
The thirty-five countries and territories from which Sabine reported conflicts for NBC News, include the allied Gulf Wars in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait; wars in Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Kosovo and Chechnya; the US invasion of Haiti; the Genocide in Rwanda; the Ebola outbreak in Zaire; revolutions in Poland, Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia and sectarian conflicts in Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Pakistan, South Africa and Northern Ireland.
In 2006, between tours of Iraq for NBC, Sabine tested positive for the expanded Huntington's gene. His father, uncle, half-brother and brother John, would all die of Huntington's disease (HD). John, five years older than Charles, was, before he became symptomatic, an Oxford graduate and barrister in London. In interviews, Sabine has described why he then chose to use what remaining time he had, to switch battlefields from Baghdad to the one facing HD families due to unparalleled misrepresentation, discrimination and prejudice: “My neurologist said: ‘there is nothing you can do about this disease, just live your life as well as you can.’” Sabine relates. In the coming months, however, he realised that: “The neurologist was completely wrong. There is everything I can do about this disease. The problem, is finding the time to do it all.”
HDF Gala at the Harvard Club NYC
Sabine has become one of the foremost lay opinions on the ethics of future scientific research. Among keynote lectures across the globe, he has spoken at:
The Vatican in Rome
The Royal Institution in London
The CHDI HD Therapeutics Conference, Palm Springs, California
The European Molecular Biology Organisation Symposium in Heidelberg
The Harvard Club in New York City
The International Society for Stem Cell Research Global Forum in Tokyo
The Carlyle Group Global Summit in Santa Barbara
The IBM Watson Symposium on Computational Neuroscience in New York State
The UK Parliament in Westminster
The World Huntington's Disease Congress in Vancouver
The European Parliament in Brussels
The Gladstone Institute 'Science for Life' Lecture, UC San Fransisco
The World Congress for Freedom of Scientific Research in Rome
The Montreal Neurological Institute Anniversary Symposium
The Masterclass in Neuroscience Nursing, National Hospital, in London
The World Huntington's Disease Congress in Rio de Janeiro
The Food and Drug Administration Critical Path HDRSC, in Silver Spring, Maryland
The Italian Senate in Rome
The World Huntington's Disease Congress in Melbourne
The International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste
The British Academy of Film and Television Arts in London
TEDx Bath
The Gairdner Nobel Forum, Convocation Hall, Toronto
The Ether Dome, Harvard University, MGH