Famed American immunologist Jim Allison is known for his services to the field of science for more ways than one. The music-loving, 71-year-old scientist is on his path of discovering a plausible cure for one of the most lethal diseases in the world, cancer, and a documentary on him chronicles just that.
Titled Breakthrough, the documentary is a brainchild of filmmaker Bill Haney which orbits around the arc of Allison’s revolutionary career from a childhood replete of loss from cancer in rural Texas to a Nobel prize in medicine, along with Tasuku Honjo of Japan in 2018.
The documentary elucidates upon Allison’s journey of finding a method of curing cancer, from surgery to radiation and chemotherapy.
While all three conventional methods rely on outside agents to destroy cancer cells, Allison’s breakthrough was to see potential in the body’s own immune system, which cancer has adapted to avoid, to fight cancer cells.
“The country is so divided right now that I was trying to find a storyline that was more uniting and that could serve as a prism to think about how we could solve big problems together rather than how we demonized the opposition,” Haney told the Guardian about his documentary on Allison. There’s no pro-cancer lobby, he added. “We’re all against cancer.”
He further went on, “While society’s attention has been particularly focused on the darkness in Washington, out of the science laboratories around the country and around the world, some extraordinarily beautiful things are happening.”
Allison himself feels that people have been jittery about his breakthrough.
“For years, people said, this will never work. And if it doesn’t work, you’re wasting your time,” he shared.
The documentary also revolves around personal struggles and sacrifices about cancer survivors. But more so, it is about Allison’s inspiring journey to come up with a cure for the disease.
Haney shared, “I ultimately hope people are inspired by Jim and by his personal example, by the notion that we can solve the most challenging possible problems if we just go about it together in the right way and by the life of joy and creativity that living in the world of sciences can be.”
Meanwhile Allison revealed, “I hope people see it and say, yeah that’s something that I’d like to do. You can enjoy doing science and help make the world a better place at the same time.”
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