Eric Lander is president and founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. A geneticist, molecular biologist, and mathematician, he has played a pioneering role in the reading, understanding, and biomedical application of the human genome. He was a principal leader of the Human Genome Project. Lander is professor of biology at MIT and professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School. From 2009 to 2017, he served as co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Lander’s honors include the MacArthur Fellowship, Gairdner Foundation Award, Dan David Prize, and Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.

Who is the monster? Does science undermine our moral code? A conversation about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a forerunner to questions still being posed today, 200 years after its publication.

Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer-prizewinning American science journalist, columnist, and author of five books, including The Poisoner’s Handbook (2010), and Love at Goon Park (2002). She is a former president of the National Association of Science Writers, was a member of the governing board of the World Federation of Science Writers, and currently serves as vice president of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. Blum is co-editor of the book A Field Guide for Science Writers, and in 2015, she was selected as the fourth director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT.

Dr. Frankenstein’s inability to take responsibility for his Creature causes chaos in Mary Shelley’s novel. Can we direct future ramifications of recent groundbreaking scientific discoveries related to biological engineering, artificial intelligence, and the extension of human life?

Thomas Cooper, Professor of Media Studies at Emerson College,  was recently a guest scholar at Stanford, Berkeley, the East-West Center and the University of Hawaii. The Association for Responsible Communication which he founded was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Cooper taught at Harvard, where he graduated magna cum laude. A former assistant to Marshall McLuhan, he was a consultant to the Elders Project which involved Nelson Mandela, Kofi Anan and Jimmy Carter. Cooper is also a playwright, musician, poet, black belt, blogger, and author of eight books and over one two hundred academic and professional  articles and reviews.

Brandon Ogbunu is an Assistant Professor at Brown University, in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Prior to that, he held positions in the Department of Biology at University of Vermont, the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. His research takes place at the crossroads between computational biology, evolutionary genetics, and epidemiology.  He ultimately aims to understand the many forces, genetic and environmental, that give rise to disease. Brandon’s broader interests transcend these formal research areas. He’s an active participant in the scientific communication, educational technology, health policy, and science-inspired art spaces. He was featured on the award-winning 2017-2018 WPSU-PBS digital series Finding Your Roots: The Seedlings, has served on the board of the Underground Railway Theater (Cambridge, MA), been a consultant for UNICEF and for startup tech companies that develop adaptive learning tools.  He sees all of these activities as serving his greater goal of democratizing science towards a more inclusive enterprise that is better equipped to solve cutting-edge scientific, environmental, ethical, and biomedical problems.

The playwrights’ group Catalyze will stage readings of several ten-minute plays responding to timeless themes from Mary Shelley’s masterpiece. 200 years later, in this historical moment, Frankenstein inspires artists to explore the thin membrane between science and art, life and death, creation and hubris. (NOTE: Different plays are read on Oct. 20 and Nov. 3.)

Catalyze is a group of science, speculative, and slipstream playwrights based out of Central Square Theater.  The Catalyze Playwriting Group is an offshoot of Catalyst Collaborative@MIT (CC@MIT), a collaboration between Central Square Theater and MIT. The Catalyze Playwriting Group writes, workshops, and performs new works of science theatre.

Central Square Theatre Welcomes Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel

Join us after the 7:30pm show on Thursday, February 7, 2019 for a lively conversation with a scholar about their work and thoughts on the production.

Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel is the author of Bernard Shaw, W. T. Stead, and the New Journalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and Shaw, Synge, Connolly, and Socialist Provocation (University Press of Florida, 2011). He is on the Editorial Board of SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies and is Co-Editor of Palgrave Macmillan’s Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries series. In 2017, he was interviewed for the ‘The Point’ on NPR-WCAI, titled ‘George Bernard Shaw and the Freedom of the Press’. He is a Professor at Massachusetts Maritime, where he chaired Humanities for five years. His Ph.D. is from Brown University.

Click here to listen to NPR interview with Ritschel on Shaw’s works.