Charles Sabine OBE

 Charles Sabine OBE, Emmy Award winning television journalist, worked for the US Network NBC News for twenty-six years before becoming 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.

He joined NBC in 1982 in London and became a producer on the ‘Today’ show in New York in 1987. According to NBC, “he participated in most of the major international news stories of the last two decades – Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Syria, Haiti, South Africa, Rwanda, Zaire, Iran, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Northern Ireland." Sabine, as producer of the NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw team coverage of the ‘Romanian Revolution’, 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.

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.”

Sabine has become one of the foremost lay opinions on the ethics of future scientific research. Among keynote lectures across four continents, Charles has spoken at:

Keynote Lectures

  • The Vatican in Rome

  • The Royal Institution in London

  • 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 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