Lara Miller, Writer 

Sloan Grant(s) Received: 2023, Carnegie Mellon University, Screenwriting Award

Project Type: Feature 

Genre: Drama

Length: 112 pages 

Field of Science: Biology

Stage: Development 

Synopsis: 

Grace Odero lives on Mfangano Island, a small fishing community off the coast of western Kenya. Her father is a Community Health Worker and has raised his daughter to attend medical school and return as her island’s first physician. But Grace has different dreams. Having witnessed the havoc that malaria has wreaked on her community, Grace wants to be the scientist who finally figures out how to eradicate it from the earth.

Rather than come clean to her father, Grace lies and secretly accepts a PhD position at MIT. While there, she meets Miles, a goofy-sweet Chinese American post-doc in genetics, working to insert a mouse gene into mosquitoes that can confer malaria resistance. He now needs a way to ensure the inheritance of this foreign gene to mosquito offspring. Enter the gene drive.

With the help of CRISPR Cas9 gene editing, Grace and Miles pioneer a novel and effective gene drive package that wins them both accolades and job offers. But when Grace realizes the potential of this platform both for human benefit and human harm, she questions what she has helped to create.