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It seemed extravagant to fly to Boston from Los Angeles just to see a play, but in the end I couldn't resist.

Early in February of 2013 I had received an email from my friend Jonathan Beckwith, a distinguished microbiologist and geneticist at Harvard Medical School, telling me about a new project he had organized. Jon had recently participated in a collaboration at the Free University of Berlin with science students and members of the English Theater Berlin. They had all read Caryl Churchill's play, A Number, on the subject of human cloning, and discussed the social issues it raised. Excited by this experience, Jon decided to try something similar with his students at Harvard. But instead of having them discuss existing plays, he and a former student, Ben Morris, recruited Sightline theater director Calla Videt to work with students in his "Social Issues in Biology" class to create a new theater piece altogether.

Their collaboration produced Edge of the Map, a collage based on real-life and invented scenarios involving ethical and social dilemmas in genetics. One of...