Sarah Tabrizi: The Long Work of Getting Somewhere

Last week marked ten years of partnership between the Laidlaw Foundation and UCL, one of the universities at the heart of our global community. It feels a fitting moment to turn to someone from within it whose career is a lesson in how long meaningful work can take, and how much failure it absorbs on the way. Sarah Tabrizi, Professor of Neurology at UCL and this month appointed CBE for her services to people with Huntington's disease, has spent close to thirty years working towards something the field had begun to think impossible. From the outside, a career like Tabrizi's looks like a line of breakthroughs. She is quick to tell the scientists she mentors that the reality is mostly the opposite:

Sarah Tabrizi: "I don't know anyone who hasn't failed at some point."

 A Field Built on Setbacks

Tabrizi co-founded the UCL Huntington's Disease Centre, now the largest Huntington's clinical group in Europe, and has spent her career on a disease whose gene was identified in 1993 but which resisted every attempt to slow it for the three decades that followed. Last year, the trial she advised as lead scientist reported that a new gene therapy had slowed the disease's progression by a striking margin, the first time any treatment had been shown to do so. That result did not arrive in spite of the years of trials that led nowhere. It arrived because she and the field kept running them, learning from each one, until something finally worked. The breakthrough is the visible part of a much longer story, most of which looked, at the time, like failure.

What the Failures Were For

When Tabrizi says she knows no one who has not failed, she is not offering reassurance so much as describing the actual texture of ambitious work. Research that matters tends to spend long stretches not succeeding, and the people who reach something at the end are usually the ones who were willing to stay in those stretches. For scholars beginning a research project or a Leadership in Action plan this year, this is worth holding onto early. The experiments that do not work, the directions that turn out to be wrong, the months where nothing seems to move, these are not signs you have taken a wrong turn. They are most of what the work is, and staying with them is how the occasional breakthrough becomes possible at all! 

Values in Focus

Tabrizi's message speaks to the Laidlaw value of being #Ambitious and the Oxford Character Project virtue of #Drive. Ambition, in her case, has meant setting out to change the course of a disease that had defeated everyone before her, knowing the attempt would involve far more failure than success along the way. Drive is what sustains that kind of work, the initiative and persistence to keep going across the years when the results are not yet there, until at last they are.

A Call to Reflect

As you consider Sarah Tabrizi's words, we invite you to reflect and share in the comments: when has staying with something through its difficult, unrewarding stretch led you somewhere you could not have reached by an easier route?