MARVELOUS ENCOUNTERS

Concept: A series of two/three-actor, one-hour, real-time dramas depicting famous scientists at critical points in their lives, revealing their science, philosophies and real-life human struggles relatable to scientists, and non-scientists alike. A show about the joy/humanity of discovery in science rather than merely stagnant, esoteric technology, the cinemagraphic style of each show tailored to the temperament of the scientist in question. 

Story Structure/Tone:
For each episode, a famous or SHOULD be famous scientist is profiled by showing said scientist during a half-hour real-time dramatization of a critical event in his life. An active interaction takes place between said scientist and another person which catalyzes the scientist to re-examine his past, present or future life. The dialogue is fiction, but based on real scientific and biographical facts, and interactions which can easily be inferred between the lines of what was written about these scientists, and what they wrote about themselves. Emphasis is put on the socio-political aspects about the times during which the scientists lived which forged their Work, and themselves. Multicultural perspectives are presented, ranging from what is inaccurately called ‘primitive’ Aboriginal North America and Siberia to so-called ‘refined’ urban Europe.
The key element here is that true science is NOT technology but innovation. The founders of REAL science were anything but geeks, nerds, though on occasion they were dorks. Genius and virtue did not always go hand in hand. As such, these educational dramas have a contemporary EDGE which makes them believable to far more than the techno-crowd. There is also heart in the telling of the tale. After all, in the words of Einstein, ‘Without science, religion is blind. Without religion (spirituality), science is lame.” Yet… “Great spirits have always met violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
Often those who were innovative were not famous. Some episodes will concentrate on significant inventions and discoveries on which the genius (or geniuses) was not recognized by the history books.
Emphasis on the importance of working WITH rather than against, or in complete isolation, is promoted. For instance, Henry Ford’s innovation was that he knew the importance of people working together with agendas that could be merged for a Common Good. Many of Tesla’s failings were due to his inability to work with, or relate to, other scientists, or for that matter other people.
Einstein’s most famous picture is that where he sticks his tongue out laughingly at a reporter. The series will display COMEDY as part of the drama. This not only humanizes the science, and the scientist, but enhances viewer appeal, and ability of the viewer to comprehend scientific and socio-ethnic principles related.
The producers have developed a specialty in the areas of humanizing and humor-infusing science (and scientists), the latest produced work being “Mindless Love”. “Mindless” is a one hour comedy/drama in the CHUM/Citytv anthology ’13 Stories About Love’, in which how a young and old First Nations scientists deal with that most complex, yet simple, human emotion----love (to be aired 2005). 


Scientists profiled (scripts/tapes available upon request)

Nicola Tesla : 
The most eccentric, misunderstood and humanistic physicist of the 19th and early 20th Century who invented most everything, but got credit for virtually none of it. Tesla was nominated for the Nobel Prize but lived the last 20 years of his life in poverty, ignored by the world and ridiculed by his competitors (e.g., Edison) who, to the very end, did whatever they could to discredit, humiliate and steal from him. 
In this episode, Tesla is visited in the latter part of his life by an aspiring female journalist/scientist, to whom he shares his most innovative discoveries, and his innermost secrets. His faith in humanity is renewed by the visitor. Upon leaving, we find out that she is a spy, sent by Edison, to get the last of Tesla’s ideas in exchange to get a position in his multimillion dollar laboratory. But she keeps the notes to herself, deciding to be her OWN person after being inspired by the most rugged (and perhaps deluded) individualist of 19th Century Science. PRODUCED, Oct 2003 

Albert Einstein: 
The most innovative work done by Einstein was in 1905, when he stayed late at work, having completed his mundane job as a Clerk at the Swiss Patent Office. His home life was miserable, the relationship with his first wife strained and the bonds with his sons very distant. He held firm to Pacifist views in a world rapidly moving towards War in the name of King and Country, and the dollar. Worried about his real place in the world, and obsessed with trying to figure out how the Universe REALLY worked, he struggled daily..and nightly, to produce four papers that revolutionized Modern Physics, including the Theory of Relativity. 
What kinds of conversations would the learned and socially-distant twenty-something Einstein have had with a gregarious, semi-literate, yet very wise Janitor in the Patent Office after hours who talked common sense about life, science and relationships into the ‘respectful rebel’ scientist? Then there is the role his first wife, Mileva, played in his life scientifically, a woman of great scientific promise when she met Albert as a student. 
Mileva became emotionally unstable, and some say ignored/abused, once children came into the picture and pressure for the Einsteins to suceed professionally mounted. Papers recently revealed to the public reveal that Mileva was co-investigator with Albert in science, whose name never appeared on the papers on which she contributed. 
(Script available upon request)

Ramon y Cajal. 
The Grandfather of neuroscience and neurobiology was a Spaniard who decided to do his research up in the hills of his Native Spain on his own terms rather than become a lackey for the ‘elite’ Professors at the then prestigious German and Swiss Universities. He defended Spanish Culture at every turn but angrily disappointed with his beloved country’s people for their intellectual and moral shortcomings. Cajal’s life outside of his being a scientist was very worldly, his travels, battles with authorities and adventures making Hemmingway look like a monk who never left the monastery. As a child, Cajal wanted to be a painter, and was good at it. But his father, a self-taught scholar and physician, did everything he could to beat the artist out of the lad, and succeeded…sort of. 
As an adult, Cajal had microscopes that you would be considered unworthy of inclusion in a children’s biology kit. Yet, his speculations put down in his volumes finally published in 1928 have all proven to be true, his basic and persistent scientific intuition confirmed by state-of-the-art electron microscopes and neurophysiological recording devises. And---there are still hypotheses yet to be proven by technological advancements to come!
In this episode, we see Cajal towards the end of his life, doing a special painting for his departed father in the mountain cabin that was their special hide out. Enter an ex-Spaniard, now German, evolving Nazi electrical engineer stranded in the mountains with his injured son, who has a talent for music said father wants to beat out of him, for his own good. The elder Cajal intervenes in the father-son conflict, while working out his own legacy with his own paternal departed friend, and enemy.
(Script available upon request)

Max Planck. 
When Planck entered the University of Munich in 1874, he was told by his professor that physics was a complete science with little prospect for advancement. Fortunately, Planck didn’t heed this warning, developing the cornerstones for understanding the science of light and what was to become quantum physics. By the turn of the century, Planck was the most respected physicist in Europe. He noted the genius and humanity of Einstein when no one else did, bringing him into the upper tiers of Academic Science at the University of Berlin just prior to the outbreak of WWI.
Planck lost his eldest son during WWI, but remained at his Academic Post, focusing his pain into furthering scientific investigations. He was President of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gessellschaft, Germany’s primary research organization, in 1930, and remained in that position in 1933 when the Nazis took power. Einstein, one of Planck’s closest friends, fled Germany with a price on his head for his opposition to Fascism. But Planck remained, for reasons he seldom revealed, keeping his position until 1937. In 1945, his other son was executed for involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler.
What would Max Planck have related to his son on the eve of his execution in 1945? What would Planck remember as his most important scientific accomplishments? His feelings about how scientists should be responsible for how their discoveries are used by politicians, generals and others? His thoughts about separation of politics and academic science? His moral dilemmas regarding his attempts to work within the Nazi system to promote a much global good, and humanity, as was possible?

Gregor Mendel.
The father of genetics is famous for his planting peas and determining patterns of heredity with various cross-breeding experiments, studies he conducted in Brno, Czeckoslovakia, in his spare time as a lowly monk. Mendellian genetics is the basis of most medicine today. But there were things that the standard medical texts do not relate. 
There was Mendel, the man, who was a monk by profession, but an ambitious politician by temperament. He sought political power through his scientific work as well as his theological affiliations.
Then there was Mendel the scientist, who, by some people’s definitions, ‘fudged’ his data in ways that would bring him up on charges of scientific fraud today. Retrospective research and checking of the books half a century after Mendel’s work became biological ‘law’ revealed that his data was just too perfect, and that he probably threw out aberrant data that didn’t match his ongoing hypothesis. Still, his intuition about MOST of medical genetics turned out to be correct.
What would it have been like for an assistant to Mendel watching the old Master doing his work, and giving critical comment on its methodology, and what drove it forward? What if the assistant were a political refugee from justice whose presence in the monestary threatened Mendel’s authority, and survival? What if said assistant observed Mendel’s pattern of breaking down emotionally and physically every time he had to take an exam, or face a judgement?
(Script available upon request).

Pierre LaPlace
The basic laws of that apply to gases in 21st century biology, chemistry and physics were originated by LaPlace in the 18th Century in Normandy. He was destined for a life as a Priest until, at the age of 16, he was discovered by two teachers, C. Gadbled and P. LeCanu. What was that moment like,when these teachers recognized this mathematical genius? This was a time when theology and science were considered enemies. And when going into science was considered, by some, to be an immoral act. The objective methods used in scientific investigations were just emerging, and evolving. The principles of non-biased investigations that are the cornerstones of research today.

George Washington Carver.
The most famous and influential Afro-American scientist was born somewhere near the end of the Civil War to Slave parents, kidnapped by Confederate raiders and returned to his Missouri home at the closing of the conflict. His education started in a one-room Missouri schoolhouse, culminating in an MA in agriculture at Iowa State University near the turn of the Century. Carver’s innovative, scientifically-based, crop rotation methods became common practice by Negro as well as White Southern farmers, particularly alternating cotton and peanut planting. He developed over 325 uses for peanut oil, ranging from cooking oil to printer ink. His work with other plants included extracts from sweet potato and pecans for use in synthetic rubber and highway pavement. 
Carver considered himself a deeply religious man in an age of scientifically-driven materialism. Through his products and teaching, he humanized science and made it understandable to a bewildered, and often frightened, public. His approach to Civil Rights was logical, and non-violent.
What would a conversation have been like between Carver and a poor, Atheist, White share-cropper, in a town where he once worked as a lowly laborer as a youth, perhaps during the Depression, when Black and White starved alive? How would Carver convince an individual hostile to his science, skin color and spirituality to consider his recommendations and scientifically-based suggestions? And how would Professor Carver and his Afro-American student deal with a mechanical breakdown at the house of a broke, armed, racist White farmer who is in severe need the Professor’s technology, said racist having a crazy wife who falls in love with the Professor’s student?
(Script available upon request).

Madame Curie. 
Listed as a co-discoverer of radium and X-ray technology with her husband, Madame Curie remains a pioneer scientist in an age where women were seldom seen, and rarely heard in scientific circles. She was a close friend of Einstein, and a savvy Renaissance woman who knew how to negotiate around the barriers presented to someone of her gender. She also trained several women who wanted to enter the scientific profession, privately, and in what would have been very revealing times, particularly after the death of her husband.
Madame Curie’s work gave international attention to the Nobel Prize as it related to cross—disciplines, including merging of physics with medicine and chemistry. 
What most of the world does NOT know is that Marie Curie was a fiesty, outspoken, poetic and sensuous Polish ‘foreinger’ who invaded the French scientific establishment by storm, working side by side AND independently of her pro-feminist, and beloved, husband Pierre. Pierre died young, a victim to radiation poisoning, encountered while the two renegades were hot on the trail of charactarising and capturing the newest form of Energy since electricity. 
After Pierre’s death, Marie Curie had an affair with a married French biologist, Paul Lavengan, who had an ‘understanding’ with his wife in the spirit of the well-accepted Napoleonic Code. But Mme. Lavengan had other ideas, looking to blackmail the ever-rising star of Science and Feminism, enlisting the lowest form of journalists and anti-Semites in her manipulative, vengeful plot to publicize the affair. The situation drew her husband, Paul, into a real-life pistol duel with a washed-out scientist who became infamous as a promoter of bigotry and Fascist propaganda in pre WWI France. In the same year that Marie Curie received he Nobel Prize, she was being slandered in the lay press all over Europe. 
What would the ghost Pierre Curie have said to Marie during ‘visits’ to her while she was having this affair, and continuing her science, recalling past days of wonderous discovery, and anticipating a brave new world to come in the wake of their earth shattering discoveries? 
(Script available upon request)

Medicine Mountain. 
In contrast to European-originated science where a discovery bears the name of its discoverer, the community is given credit to scientific breakthroughs in most Aboriginal cultures, that knowledge passed on orally, preserved by strict protocol. Such is the history of ‘Medicine Mountain’, a very real location in Interior British Columbia on which grow life-promoting herbs and other botanicals that were, and continue to be, used by Native healers. The Mountain was located in the ‘border-zone’ between several tribes including the Lillowat, Okenagen and Shuswap. Blessed with an ecosystem that supported a miraculously-large variety of health-promoting plants, it was designated as a ‘neutral zone’ from which all tribes could gather what they needed, at specific times of the year, and with specific ‘permits’. No blood was ever shed on the mountain, though many braves lost their lives in battles around it.
What would happen if a young Harvard-trained physician in search of medicines and food for a Wagon Train of settlers were to run into Medicine Man who educated him in the ways of healing mind, body AND spirit of his patients? To be shot on location of the actual ‘Medicine Mountain’ that, despite massive logging, still exists today.

‘Survivor’ Siberian Style. 
The history of Russian settlement of Siberia is much like European expansion in North America. An explorer from Moscow planting a flag on the Pacific Beach at Vladavostok in the seventeeth Century, or even the 20th century, hardly was a realistic claim to Mother Russia having juristiction over the Siberian wilderness. The reality of Russian expansion into Siberia was that European-educated Orthodox Christians who listened to Pagan Shamen who knew how to survive in the wilderness. The Russians were not the only group of invaders to Siberia. The Japanese moved into the region in the 18th and 19th Centuries, resulting in Russo-Japanese conflicts that persist even today. 
What if a Russian engineer building the Trans-Siberian railroad and a Japanese military officer were stranded in Eastern Siberia, their survival dependent upon working with each other, and the help of a Native Hermit who knows how to keep his ‘guests’ fed during a winter storm? Said Hermit is a composite character of a misunderstood Shamen genius whose tribe voted him out, who finds out from the Japanese soldier that his daughter is still alive, pregnant, and waiting for him in Japan. He helps his two guest move on to the next destination, building all manners of boats, sleds and wagons to catch the last boat out from Vladavostock. A race against time which requires all three cultures to merge technologies for the common good. 

Ulugh Beg. 
Western science forgets that it was Islamic scientists in the East who laid down the foundations for modern mathematics and astronomy. While scientific investigation in Europe was repressed by the Church, religion spurred on science in Islamic countries. An example of this is found in the early 15th Century Afghanistan. Ulugh Beg was grandson to Timur, a Conqueror whose Empire spread from Turkey to India. When barely in his 20s, Ulugh set out to establish a center for multi-disciplinary investigations in the arts and sciences which became a focal point for the greatest minds of his time, and an Observatory bigger than any previously known. 
Ulugh was a participatory director of his Institute, inviting free and open discourse of all who attended meetings he hosted. The results included binomial theorem, tables of sines and tangents, and determining the location of nearly 1,000 stars in ways that could be used for various purposes, including navigation and calendar keeping. 


Framing the segments:
Intros to the pieces will be done by a high-profile individual appropriate for the topic at hand. The end portion will outline key accomplishments of the scientist in the mainframe of history. Creative camera work and musical backdrops will make such expository narrative fluid, rather than stagnant. 

Relevance/Demographic:
More technological advancements have been made in the last 100 years than in the last 10,000, yet little is known about the inner lives of the people who changed science, which changed technology, which changed everything we do, feel and think. How did the original discoverers of our current day biology, physics and chemistry think, and feel? And how can their example inspire students and aspiring scientists of ALL ages and ethic backgrounds? The joy of discovery is universal to all people, but channeled in a particular manner.
The series has an EDGE which makes it relatable to more than techno geeks/nerds, and believable to a questioning adolescent and thinking adult audience. As an education tool, how inspiring it will be to profile people so dedicated to their passions to a world of people who do not know what their dreams are, or have given up on them!
Though scientists are portrayed as history says they really were, the ‘champion’ ideal is that of heart and intelligently-directed compassion. Even the most saintly of scientists had some traits that were less than admirable, and it is shown how these were destructive to the well being of the scientist and/or the Work.
The selection of the character with which the scientist interacts is carefully chosen to (a) bring out character traits in the ‘genius’ profiled, (b) accentuate telling of the story/science and (c) put on the screen characters from various ethnic backgrounds to maximize viewer appeal. 
Scientists in this series and projected episodes from it will represent diverse ethic and racial backgrounds, and be of both genders. Appropriate ‘lead’ episodes for broadcasters will thus be available, (e.g., female scientists for WTN, Aboriginal inventors for Aboriginal People’s Television Network).

Cost-Effectiveness
The settings for these dramas are one or two rooms, the two actors. Thus, low production costs are incurred relative to other dramas. Due to the Nature of the program, it is feasible to obtain the services of world-recognized actors for Scale or close to Scale Wages. As such, this will distinguish the series from many other science dramas/re-enactments.
Clever and innovative cinematography with simple special effects will be used to prevent these television dramas to become ‘stagey’. Many styles of shooting currently accepted for other genres will be employed, most of these styles having emerged to reduce production time.
The format used will be HD video, significantly less costly than 35 mm film, and more appropriate for this ‘personal’ genre. Transfer to film is possible after the process if complete if/as appropriate.
Actors with global recognition may be drawn to this project because of the topic and nature of the programming. Flexible production schedules require said performer for one week. Dramatic actors who have taken to doing projects for the educational/’edu-tainment’ marketplace include Alan Alda, John Cleese, Jonathon Miller, etc. Many performers may have specific interests in scientific topics profiled because of their personal situations (e.g., Christopher Reeves, Michael J Fox).
Unique tax incentives/rebates are available for productions shot in Interior British Columbia. Standard Canadian labor expenditure (below the line) rebates for production done in Canada is 16%, with an additional Provincial rebate of 20%, plus a regional Interior incentive of 12.5%. Co-production with European television producers currently in negotiation. 


Consultants/Contributing Writers and Researchers:
R.G. Pellegrino, M.D., Ph.D.
Dr Pellegrino obtained his MD from Albert Einstein College of Medicine and his Ph.D. from Yale. He is a world-renowned pioneer in the scientific design and humane application of clinical trials for drugs to treat neurological diseases and a host of other conditions. He has received numerous awards, including Top Outstanding Young American, a national award given to ten people a year, an honor which has bestowed on most of the Presidents and Vice Presidents of the United States at some time during their earlier lives. 

M.F. Zanakis, Ph.D.
Doctor Zanakis is a multi-disciplinary inventor and scientist who has over 100 inventions to his credit in areas ranging from portable CAT scanners to pills to control obesity. He has held faculty posts at Cooper Union College of Engineering, New York College of Osteopathic Medicine and was research director at the Kesler Institute, the establishment that took care of Christopher Reeves during critical periods of his rehabilitation after spinal cord injury.

Jennifer Sass, Ph.D..
Doctor Sass has a Ph.D. in the biomedical sciences and is currently working within the political machinery of Washington as an intermediary party between government, industry and the academic scientific community. Agencies she works with on a continuous basis include the FDA and the EPA. 

Mark Evered, Ph.D.
Professor Evered is presently Dean at the University of Saskatchewan, actively involved with formulating and initiating biomedical training programs at that institution.

John Iversen, D.V.M.
Professor Iversen is an internationally-recognized epidemiologist and microbiologist, currently based at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine in Saskatoon.