Palmer had students stage readings of plays where they engaged ancient and modern scientific controversies.  Among others, they did dramatic readings of historical plays about Rosalind Franklin and the structure of DNA and Heisenberg’s role in the Nazi A-Bomb effort, as well as a fantasy about Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley and the Bishop of Oxford stuck in “limbo,” in this case imagined as Malibu, California.

“The in-class readings of the plays helped us get away from looking at issues from the typical outsider’s point of view.  Since we got to act out the plays, the issues we talked about during the alternating seminar meetings seemed more personal.”

Drama is also an excellent tool, Palmer said, to recover people forgotten by current texts and in doing so raise old ethical issues in new ways.  Take, for example, Fritz Haber.  A German Nobel Prize winner, Haber today is best remembered for his discovery of a way to take nitrogen out of the air as ammonia, an essential process that laid the groundwork for the “Green Revolution” four decades later.

But Haber also was involved in the German war effort in World War I.

“His Nobel Prize was delayed until after the war because the flip side of his work was that it prolonged the war since it allowed the German government to get the nitrates they needed for their munitions at a time that the Allied Atlantic blockade had cut their supply lines,” Palmer said.  “An even more extreme and controversial expression of his unstinting support of his native Germany was his development of the use of chlorine gas in the trench war.”

Even after winning the Nobel Prize, the conflicts for Haber continued.  He was Jewish, but he had pragmatically converted to Christianity as a young man in order to advance his career.  In 1933 the Nazis told him that he had to fire all his Jewish staff and would be fired himself if he didn’t.  He refused, and resigned his position as director of the Institute for Physical and Electrochemistry at Berlin-Dahlem and was forced to leave the country.  A year later he died in exile, a broken and bitterly disheartened man.  

“Of course, you can get at all of these conflicts by reading historical texts,” Palmer said.  “But there’s a play, ‘Einstein’s Gift’, about Haber that gets at the tragic contradictions of his career in a beautiful way.  We’ve done some plays deliberately that probably should have been essays, but, in the best plays, such as ‘Einstein’s Gift,’  a measure of literary license is used at the expense of historical fact but with very effective illumination of the underlying scientific principles and/or ethical issues. “

There’s another reason why Palmer says he likes combining drama and science.

“Frankly, it’s a lot of fun.   For example, we do a reading of ‘Picasso at the Lapin Agile’ by Steve Martin. It’s a LOL play but underneath it there is a really powerful representation of the essence of creativity—of its essential equivalence in art and science.  It has a beautiful and insightful ending, but there’s a lot of very clever, funny stuff on the way.  You could write a short essay on this, and in fact there is a recent book by Arthur I. Miller on the parallel thought patterns of Einstein and Picasso.  The book is full of fascinating detail and is beautifully insightful, but the play is a hoot, and the core truth is there too.”   

Palmer said he’s impressed by the generally articulate treatment of science issues in the plays, despite the fact that most of the plays are written by non-scientists.  One exception is “Oxygen,” a play co-written by scientists Carl Djerassi and Nobel Laureate Roald Hoffman.  It’s a fact-based, but very lively, drama about the discovery of oxygen that explores the meaning of scientific discovery, why it’s important to be first in science and the ethical conflicts involved giving credit for prior work. 

At the end of the semester, students in both courses broke into small groups and wrote their own one-act plays with science themes.  The plays ranged from historical dramas about the race for the polio vaccine to exploration of current ethical issues such as fetal enhancement and stem cell research to a futuristic look at robots in society.

For the students, most of whom are non-scientists, the play’s the thing.  Palmer said students in the first edition of the Focus course proposed writing their own original plays instead of conventional term papers.  It was such a success it has become a standard part of the curriculum. 

“I especially enjoyed writing a play,” Choe said. “It seemed like a monstrous task that would take an eternity.  However, as my partner and I gathered facts – we wrote a historical fiction play about Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton – the play just seemed to fall into place.  It was made easier by the fact we based our play on two distinguished but eccentric individuals.

“I hate to admit it, but I actually liked acting out the plays in class.  It really helped me empathize with the characters and focus on the issues at hand even more.”

One question Palmer asks his students is whether scientific drama is a genre of theater or only a convenient collection of plays? He said he doesn’t know the answer.

“It does make an interesting collection, and the playwrights who’ve gotten into this are on to something.  Discoveries of science have made an enormous impact on society, and on occasion the disturbances of sciences come into great conflict with social mores and with fundamental moral beliefs.  Such conflicts are ripe for dramatization.  The resulting plays give us a window on the human side of science.”