If you blink, you’ll miss Helen Hunt as a frog biologist in Cast Away. I’m not sure we actually see her doing anything biological [except breathing perhaps]. She’s on screen a lot less than the volleyball.
The original Godzilla features a biologist / palaeontologist as the most useful human in a time of great crisis and drama.
Life Story AKA The Race for the Double Helix, starring Jeff Goldblum
Also, this category: Category:Biographical films about scientists - Wikipedia
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
a Beautiful Mind is the true story of a math genius who won the Nobel prize in economics
Agora is my absolute fave.
About her:
Hypatia (born c. 350–370; died 415 AD) was a Hellenistic Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician,
Came here to post this one. It was available to download to educational institutions from some site the last time I looked for it.
“So we got it 2400% wrong. Anybody can make a mistake.”
Is A Beautiful Mind actually what you’d call “inspiring”? It seems to me that its message (as well as that of Proof, fictional but also good) is that mathematicians are crazy. Which does admittedly have some measure of truth to it.
And I’m not sure that Godzilla is any sort of model of good science. Fiction is one thing, oxygen-destroyer bombs are another.
Darwin, Annings, and Henrietta Lacks look promising, though.
I wouldn’t call the Henrietta Lacks story exactly “inspiring” either. And the Mary Anning story? That is almost as bad as my crack about making a movie about the discovery of penicillin a romance between Alexander Flemming played by Hugh Jackman and bread mold played by Jennifer Lawrence. Mary Anning spent her adult life scraping together a living for herself and her younger siblings by searching for fossils on the beach/cliffs near her house. She had a very tough life and died young from cancer. But some piece of shit comes along and decides that story isn’t sexy enough and makes the movie into a Secret Lesbian Love Affair.
In a Beautiful Mind John Nash overcomes his mental illness and returns to do more math, that is inspiring.
In real life he actually stopped taking his medications but they did not mention that in the movie because they did not want people to think they should stop medication without their Dr. approving it.
My first thought when you said that was "they should totally make a movie about the development of penicillin, during WWII - it’s actually a killer story, with intra-team drama, the backdrop of the larger conflict, stops and starts, sick little boys in hospital. Fleming’s original discovery is actually the least interesting part of the penicillin story.
So I looked, and they did.
Now I want to watch it. It’s a great story, the film’s got good enough reviews, and mmm, Dominic West 
I Aim at the Stars (1960). Kurt Jurgens, James Daly. The story of Wernher von Braun and how he ended up directing the US space program.
How “inspirational” this movie is I guess depends on your nationality. :rolleyes:
They made a documentary from that? I missed it. That book was possibly the most interesting thing (certainly the longest most interesting thing) I’ve ever read!
I thought Contagion seemed to be* a far more realistic treatment of the “killer worldwide plague!!!” plot than Hollywood normally produces; and the scientists and doctors–mostly government employees to boot–while human, flawed, and capable of making some mistakes, were fundamentally portrayed as the heroes of the story.
It was rated PG-13 and has various parental cautions attached to it (Apollo 13 was a mere PG); so that might be an issue with trying to show it to high school students (whether or not any of the things discussed in that link should be problematic for high school students).
*IANA epidemiologist
(Oh, and Contagion’s not a true story–it’s fiction, not a documentary–but, again, I thought it was very realistic and very well done.)
Yeah … not that there’s anything wrong with distorting history for the sake of being au courant. :rolleyes:
I saw that when I was in high school! It had one really scene where Dr. Ehrlich was explaining his work to some high-society women, and a couple of them got the fantods.
Sorry. I meant to say really funny scene. I’ve been up too long.