The following is an edited excerpt.
When Dr. Mary-Claire King, a geneticist at the University of Washington, learned Helen Hunt was portraying her in an upcoming feature film, she thought it must be a joke.
But the film is real and based on two concurrent stories of real-life women: Anne Parker (played by Samantha Morton), a Toronto cancer survivor determined to understand why cancer repeatedly struck the women in her family, and King’s groundbreaking, decades-long work at the University of California, Berkeley, to discover the gene (BRCA1) that leads to increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer.
Read the full story here: New film puts UW breast-cancer researcher in spotlight