Jeff Nichols in Talks for Nuclear Fusion Movie for Fox
When you are 14 years old and become the youngest person to ever achieve nuclear fusion, you get a movie made about your exploits. Deadline reports that Chernin Entertainment has picked up the rights to a magazine article titled, "The Boy Who Played With Fusion." The film will tell the true story of "Taylor Wilson, a 14-year-old Arkansan who became the youngest ever to achieve nuclear fusion." Jeff Nichols (Take Shelter, Mud writer-director) is currently in talks to helm the film.
Tom Clynes wrote the article for Popular Science magazine in March 2012. The article follows "an exceptionally smart and curious kid and what happens when his ordinary parents who didn’t quite understand how he’d become so gifted, gave him the room and encouragement to nurture his great gifts and passion for nuclear science and experimentation. When his grandmother became ill, the youth became involved in an attempt to harness the short-lived isotopes that kill cancer cells and then deteriorate before they harm healthy cells — in hopes that the cancer-curing isotopes could be generated on site at hospitals and save lives. He later harnessed his discoveries as an alarm system to root out dirty bombs in shipping containers. His story is contrasted by that of another brainiac whose brilliance was not encouraged and whose secret attempt to build a breeder reactor in a backyard shed ended with controversy and a Superfund team clad in hazmat suits hauling away his family’s contaminated belongings."