First meet Melissa Franklin, energetic "high energy" physicist, a onetime jazz disc jockey, the first woman tenured professor of science at Harvard University. She got that job after her own alma mater, the University of Toronto, turned her down.

In the Fermi National Acceleration Laboratory in Chicago, where she has helped to build "the world's biggest microscope," she's now searching for the universe's smallest particles. She wants to smack two of them together to see what happens.

As producer David Sutherland's at-work and at-home portrait reveals, this fascinating female breaks ground and open doors every day, and as she practices science, it's anything but dull.

High energy physics, as her male colleagues explain, is a macho thing of locker-room camaraderie, "a very special branch of physics that has been traditionally a man's role." Franklin has to work to win the good old boys' acceptance.

She's a great ambassador for science in the classrooms and a passionate supporter of the late, lamented super collider. She was devastated when Congress scrapped it.

"We are killing my field," she told TV critics in Los Angeles. "It's a complete lack of vision." It was the only time this "discovering" woman sounded downbeat.