Trama

Love, science, sex, infidelity, disease and comedy, the wild, mostly true story of the irrepressible Annie Parker and the almost discovery of a cure for cancer.

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 U.C. Berkeley, a brilliant research geneticist named Mary-Claire King (Helen Hunt) 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 1980's 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 (Jade Duncan) marries Paul (Aaron 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 (Marley Shelton) 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. Annie (Samantha Morton) is diagnosed with the same disease that killed her mother and sister -- breast cancer. It is severe, and surgery and chemotherapy, with all the accompanying difficulties, soon follow. She loses her hair, and if that wasn't enough to endure, her husband, never really mature or stable, has begun an affair with Anne's closest friend Louise (Alice Eve), and leaves her. Paul is soon diagnosed with cancer and expires shortly before she is diagnosed with a second cancer. While Annie struggles, King is pursuing her belief that some forms of breast and ovarian cancer have a hereditary basis. While she captures headlines for her work applying DNA fingerprinting to help reunite "the disappeared" with their families in Argentina, her priority is to map the breast cancer gene. King focuses on collecting families with a particularly high incidence of breast cancer, suspecting that these cases are most likely to reveal any genetic predispositions. Advances in genetic mapping through the 1980's gradually allow her team to embark on studies to map the location of the BRCA1 gene. Finally, in 1990, King and her team find conclusive evidence linking DNA markers on chromosome 17 with an inherited flaw in a gene dubbed BRCA1. The work was presented at the American Society of Human Genetics conference in Cincinnati, and published in Science a short time later. Mary Claire King ended up on the cover of Time, and Anne Parker finally had the answer she herself had long sought. Anne Parker happily remarried (Bradley Whitford), and a few years later contracts cancer for a third time. And survives again. And she laughed while being treated, for reasons only she knew and understood.

Based on true events, Decoding Annie Parker is the hopeful and touching story of two remarkable women and their 15-year battle against a cruel and insidious illness, breast cancer. Waged on both scientific and emotional fronts, they are drawn together not just by the disease but by their shared determination and unconventional approaches to their research and to their lives.

Annie Parker (Samantha Morton) has a personal relationship with breast cancer. Her mother and her sister died of the disease and ultimately she is diagnosed with it too. Naturally affable with an offbeat sense of humor even in the face of her own mortality, she struggles to hold her family and life together, as her body betrays her.

Meanwhile, geneticist Mary-Claire King (Helen Hunt) is convinced there is a link between DNA and cancer even if no one in her profession shares her belief. Against the advice of nearly all of her colleagues, she persists in her research and her dogged pursuit for funding that will lead to the groundbreaking study that will join the two women together. Decoding Annie Parker follows the incredible, irreverent and heartwarming story of how the paths of cancer survivor Annie Parker and geneticist Mary-Claire King intersect. With grace and humor the film chronicles how these remarkable women work to make one of the most important genetic discoveries of the 20th century.