Decoding Annie Parker

Decoding Annie Parker is a 2013 drama film written and directed by Steven Bernstein. The film stars Samantha Morton, Helen Hunt and Aaron Paul. The film tells the story of Annie Parker and the discovery of the BRCA1 breast cancer gene. Plot Eleven-year-old Annie Parker is living the perfect young life, loved by all, and especially by her mother, father, and older sister. But none of them knows that something horrible is stalking their perfect family. On a fall afternoon in 1976, young Annie hears a noise from upstairs. Her mother has collapsed and died, and an agonizing downward spiral begins. At UC Berkeley a brilliant research geneticist named Mary-Claire King is embarking on something of a personal crusade to uncover the genetic roots of breast cancer. While still in her twenties, she has already made a famous discovery that made the cover of the prestigious journal Science—quantifying the genetic variation between humans and chimpanzees. But her conviction that there is a hereditary basis to at least some forms of breast cancer is not widely shared. Nevertheless, her tireless research throughout the 1980s would end in a medical breakthrough—the discovery of the location of the BRCA1 hereditary breast cancer gene—considered one of the most important scientific discoveries of the twentieth century. At the age of 19, after the sudden death of her father, Anne marries Paul and soon is pregnant. She struggles to find a way in the world with her equally young but misguided husband and her older sister, Joan Parker who tries to become a surrogate parent to Anne. But, cruelly, Joan contracts the same cancer that killed their mother, and in a few months, she, too, is dead.