Science – it’s so glamorous, isn’t it? It’s all about the stark white shiny laboratories, sleek corporate logos and incredibly cool, intelligent, beautiful scientists who know exactly how to change the world.
Well if you’re the right kind of science, it is. Physics, for instance. Physics is glamorous. It’s all over the BBC schedules – there is a BBC directive which states you can’t go a year without something new by Brian Cox or Jim al’Khalili. Earth sciences do pretty well too with their Helen Czerskis and Iain Stewarts … and genetics has The Man in Black, Adam Rutherford. All very swanky.
I’m starting to think that my own branch of science, epidemiology, is missing out. We’re the science that examines health in populations of people, and let’s face it, talking about diabetes or heart disease and why we should eat fewer crisps doesn’t seem quite so … fabulous. The nearest thing we have to a public face is Ben Goldacre – a man who thinks wearing knitted tank tops on stage at the Eventim Hammersmith Apollo is perfectly acceptable behaviour.
I’ve decided that epidemiology and public health need a better image, and who is the best image creator, the greatest PR representative of all? Hollywood, of course.
With this is mind I’ve created some film pitches, in the hope that a kindly film producer is reading this (I expect George Clooney at the very least) and will allow me to bring my dreams of glamour to fruition:
‘Broad Street Blues’
We start with epidemiology’s best known tale. Hugh Jackman is quiet, unassuming Victorian Doc John Snow – a man who just wants to be left alone studying anaesthetics, until the day a grubby-but-photogenic young tot collapses and dies of cholera on his own doorstep. Seeking help, but tragically, moments too late …
We follow Snow as his investigations take him to London’s seedy underbelly south of the river, we gasp at the vicious corporate greed of Big Water, as the Southwark and Vauxhall Waterwork executives laugh at the profits their sewage infested muck makes them. And finally, we grip the edge of our seats as Snow rips off his shirt and runs towards the Broad Street pump shouting “Nooooo!” as an adorable young urchin goes to sip the water she has just taken from the pump. Snow grabs the child into his muscular grip, rips the handle from the pump and behold! Cholera is defeated! Just another everyday hero.
‘The Woman Who Waited’
In this tense drama, Jennifer Lawrence stars as Frances Oldham Kelsey – the one pharmacologist prepared to take on the Establishment. Watch as Kelsey spends late nights alone in her lab staring into a microscope, exasperated by her bosses wanting to make thalidomide available in every corner store in America. What is it that’s bugging her about this drug, why doesn’t it feel right?
Meanwhile, in a hospital with Big Ben visible outside the window, to show it’s England, a dashing young doctor, Fortescue (Tom Hiddleston), screams in frustration as he delivers yet another baby with foreshortened limbs – what could be doing this to so many children?
In an incredibly unlikely-but-fortunate series of events, Kelsey and Fortescue start to correspond in a touching transatlantic would-be-love-affair, and together they find out the terrible truth. Thalidomide is withdrawn, and dancing cockneys wave flags in the streets as they hoist Fortescue onto their shoulders. Kelsey weeps quiet tears on the other end of a crackling, deserted phone line as she realises she is a Woman, and will therefore receive little credit.
‘Outbreak’
(NB: I have a feeling this title may already have been used)
Brad Pitt is everyday American hero Donald Henderson, the quiet unassuming doctor charged with an epic mission – to stamp smallpox from the face of the Earth. This represents an opportunity for epic filmmaking at its best, as Henderson and his trusty band of hot young international doctors (Shia LeBoeuf, Marion Cotillard, Daniel Bruhl, Freida Pinto) travel the world searching for the One Enemy they know has the power to stop the world.
We see Henderson as he rides camel trains across the Saharan desert, becomes confused by obligatory comedy naives in a new African State and faces the evil of the Dictator (Forrest Whittaker) who wants none of his Western Medicine. We gasp as he rescues a small child from the rising floodwater in an Indian slum and has a passionate love affair with the child’s grateful, widowed outcast mother (Archie Panjabi). And finally, we cry as Henderson races the clock to reach The Last Victim of Smallpox and finish it once and for all (in reality he was a Somalian chef in his 20s but we could make it a small orphan boy for artistic licence, and to remind people that Africans need our help and should be grateful).
‘Florence’
Gwyneth Paltrow is Florence Nightingale, the sassy nurse all the soldiers feared but respected, and came to love. Our story starts with headstrong Florence telling her stern father (Ciaran Hinds) that she WILL go to the Crimea, and will not marry her slimy suitor Edwin Crapstone (Alan Cumming) after all. We follow Florence to the horrors of the Crimea (plenty of scope for CGI bodies and ruins) where we see her battle with evil head nurse Gwendolen Snooks (Imelda Staunton) over the fact that things are … well, rather dirty and don’t smell very nice.
In a fit of anger provoked by the realisation that nobody can see how much healthier the sick soldiers might be if they weren’t lying in their own poo, Florence storms out into the muddy fields and, catching her crinoline on a dead body, turns it over to see it is Edwin, her former fiancee, who really did love her and signed up to come and find her. She collapses to the ground and weeps prettily.
Back in London, the beautiful, feisty Florence takes her drawing paper and watercolours and works late into the night to draw an infographic of the terrible death toll in Crimea – not from the war, but from the lack of sanitation in the field hospitals. Our climactic scene sees Florence bursting into an office where the gentlemen of The Royal Statistical Society are holding a secret meeting without her, banging her fist on the table and demanding fresh air for all soldiers (oh, did I not mention? She believed it was the bad smell that caused illness, they hadn’t discovered germs yet).
I know that I would certainly pay good money to see all of these films at the cinema, and I’m prepared to pay the price of a little dramatic licence to make us realise what these remarkable people have done for us. So if Mr Clooney declines to call, bring on the Kickstarter campaign.
