Document(s) 4 of 6

 “When you travel, you hear the fascinating stories people have and the sorts of day-to-day issues people around the world face. Travelling made me want to communicate people’s stories, which is a fundamental part of journalism and part of why I wanted to become a journalist.” – Sarah Everts

 

Curiosity about the world and its peoples, and a knack for explaining complex issues: these are the characteristics that propelled Sarah Everts toward a career in journalism. Her calling eventually led her to cross the Pacific Ocean and film a documentary in Papua New Guinea about the ethical development of pharmaceutical drugs using substances from developing countries.

 

Born and raised in Montréal, Everts grew up during Quebec’s language tensions of the 1980s. She says there was a lot of “talking about politics and social justice” with her friends, which made her more aware of the struggles people face around the world.

 

“We were thinking about what’s important, people’s rights, why people feel undermined, and you start to become sensitive to those things,” she explains.

 

When it came time to attend university, Everts went to Guelph, Ontario, where she completed a bachelor’s degree in biophysics. She went on to finish a graduate degree in chemistry at the University of British Columbia. While there, she realized that the mainstream media wasn’t properly explaining the science behind issues like genetically modified foods and stem cell research.

 

“I felt there were really important issues to be addressed by the public, but much of the science was getting all muddled by the media. As a result, the public discourse wasn’t always well-informed,” she says.

At the same time, Everts discovered she could easily explain difficult scientific concepts to people from non-scientific backgrounds. “My family and friends who weren’t scientists seemed to understand science when I explained it to them,” she says.

 

It was this ability, combined with an interest in world affairs and travels to Belize, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, and China, which drew Everts to journalism. She found she enjoyed talking to people and sharing their stories.

 

Her foray into journalism was a travel story about a cave she visited in Belize where the Mayans made human sacrifices to the water god. The story was published in the National Post and led to several other assignments with media in Toronto, where she landed an internship at Discovery Channel. She later worked at the CBC. At the same time she was completing another graduate degree, this time in journalism, at Ottawa’s Carleton University.

 

In 2005, she received the Carleton University/IDRC Award for International Development Journalism. With the money from this grant, Everts travelled to Papua New Guinea, where she filmed a TV documentary about making pharmaceutical drugs from natural substances in an ethical and sustainable way.

 

 

Everts had heard of a Canadian researcher who had discovered an anti-cancer compound in a coral reef off the coast of Papua New Guinea, and was trying to develop a drug from it. Drugs go through a series of development stages on their way to the pharmacy shelf. Pharmaceutical companies often make milestone payments to researchers and institutions as a drug passes through certain stages, to pay scientists for their effort. Instead of splitting the money from these milestone payments with the university, this researcher  acknowledged Papua New Guineans’ ownership of their biodiversity and shared the proceeds with several institutions in the country. The money financed the building of laboratory space for local scientists.

 

Fascinated with the story, Everts set off to capture it. While her experience in Central America had made her somewhat familiar with tropical environments, shooting a documentary in that climate was quite a challenge. “Traipsing through the jungle at two degrees from the equator in the middle of a sunny day is pretty hot,” she says. “I was sweating so much I worried I was dripping on my camera. I was just drenched, but of course the Papua New Guineans are used to it, so they look cool as school.”

 

Added to that was the difficulty in producing the documentary after returning to Canada. Everts returned with over 30 hours of footage; deciding what to include was quite a task. She made it through the editing process, nevertheless, and is now pitching her documentary to several television networks.

Most recently, Everts moved from Ottawa to Washington DC, where she works as an associate editor for Chemical and Engineering News, an industry publication with a science-based audience. She’s happy to be in Washington, which she describes as a “hotbed” of documentary filmmaking. She hopes to take advantage of what it has to offer.

 

“I love being able to write for a living,” Everts says. “But of course, part of me also loves broadcast and how visuals and sound can add to a story. I’d like to immerse myself in the documentary filmmaking world here.”

 

Document(s) 4 of 6