Sarah Dawn Morales, Writer 

Sloan Grant(s) Received: 2024, UCLA, Screenwriting Award

Project Type: Feature 

Genre: Drama

Length: 90 minutes 

Field of Science: Neuroscience

Stage: Development

Synopsis: 

This is the story of the mother who mapped the human brain. It begins at the Paris School of Medicine graduation ceremony. Cecile Mugnier (28), is the only woman, and mother, in her graduating class. Oskar Vogt (30), a hypnotist-turned-neuroscientist, is the acclaimed keynote speaker. After being fired by her head resident for her unconventional research ideas, Cecile and her teenage rebel of a daughter, Claire “Lincoln” Mugnier (15), head home to find Augusta Dejerine-Klumpke (40), an American neuroanatomist and their best friend, standing over her husband, who’s finally passed on from years of kidney failure. Now in need of a new provider, Cecile agrees to go out with Oskar Vogt.

On their first date, Oskar asks Cecile what she’d do with unlimited resources. She dares to dream and proposes a thesis: If there is an inherent, biological difference between the damaged and undamaged parts of the brain tissue in patients with mental diseases, beyond afferent and efferent fibers, then therapies can be created to heal those intrinsic abnormalities. This thesis is contrary to all previous publications and the general consensus of the scientific community at the time–but Oskar is all in. He convinces Cecile to move to Berlin and work as an unpaid “assistant” at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, the first research institution in the world devoted exclusively to the brain. Cecile, Lincoln, and Augie know this is their best option for moving forward as a found-family of three women in mid-20th-century Europe.

Caught between two world wars, Cecile and an unprecedented all female team of technicians create a library of brain slices that would form the basis of the largest collection of human and animal brain slides in the world to date. We meet Lise Meitner (35), the straight shooter Jewish chemist who discovered nuclear fission. She and Lincoln form an unbreakable bond and fight for compensation for the women of the institute.

All the while, Cecile is denied entry into conferences to present her work and Oskar receives increasingly more credit for her scientific findings. WWII looms and, despite Cecile and Oskar’s protests, Eugen Fischer (40s) becomes director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics. His research would largely inform the Nuremberg Laws.

On Cecile and Oskar’s wedding day, the SS raids Cecile’s lab and fires her for her refusal to study Jewish body parts and contribute to eugenics research. The soldiers destroy thousands of brain slides and years of painstaking research. No longer safe in Berlin, Lise Meitner escapes to a lab in Sweden–the Nobel Institute for Experimental Physics. Cecile, Augie, Lincoln, and Oskar open their own research center in an isolated area of the Black Forest, where Cecile continues her scientific endeavors and shelters and employs countless Jewish scientists fleeing persecution.