Harvard Medical School senior lecturer David J. Glass is a doctor and scientist renowned for his work in muscle-nerve connections; he played a role in discovering a critical protein receptor called MuSK.
Matt Walker ’16 studied neurobiology at Harvard, earned a Ph.D. in genetics last year at Columbia University, and is launching a genetics research company.
So it’s not far-fetched that the two would collaborate on a project. The surprise is that their partnership is not in the lab, but off-Broadway. This spring, Walker starred in Spare Parts, a dystopian play about science written by Glass, who has taught experimental design for biologists at Harvard for 20 years.
Spare Parts is a black comedy about a billionaire who wants to live longer and throws money at a group of scientists who are losing funding in the current political climate; he urges them to take regulatory shortcuts and find a way to extend his life. “Needless to say,” says Glass, “things don’t go according to plan.”
“It definitely feels rare to have someone like David, who is a leader in his field, writing a play like this,” says Walker, a Hasty Pudding veteran who fittingly plays a Columbia graduate student and research assistant in Spare Parts. The play earned good reviews during its New York run—including in the journal Science, whose editor described it as a “captivating and timely” cautionary tale that asks big questions about identity, consent, and the moral compromises many researchers face.
Glass is a relative newcomer to the off-Broadway scene, but his interest in theater stretches back decades. In the 1980s, he took playwriting courses and wrote a few plays while working as a postdoctoral fellow after medical school—“I guess I wasn’t busy enough,” he quips—but after that, he gave up drama to focus on his biotech work and teaching. Then in 2020, the pandemic hit and Glass started seeing similarities between the COVID-19 and HIV crises. He wrote Love + Science, a drama about two gay medical students studying virology in the 1980s. The play premiered off-Broadway in 2023.
Walker played one of the lead roles in Love + Science, and Glass immediately thought of him when he was casting Spare Parts. For years, Walker has balanced simultaneous careers in theater and science. (Both, he says, “are about exploration, diving in to ask questions without knowing the answer.”)
Growing up in Toronto, Walker attended Canada’s National Science Fair in middle school and played Hamlet and Romeo in high school; when he was accepted to both Juilliard and Harvard, he deferred the latter to try Juilliard’s acting program for a year. While studying neurobiology at Harvard, he decided not to work in a lab, so he’d have time to act. “I really found my home and a sense of community in the Hasty Pudding,” he says.
After graduation, he needed a job to remain in the United States, so he joined a lab at Columbia run by Nobel Prize winner Martin Chalfie ’69, Ph.D. ’77. “That’s where I really fell in love with research and what it means to do experiments,” Walker says. But he kept acting, landing a role in the off-Broadway production of the farce The Play That Goes Wrong in 2019.
Walker loves appearing in Glass’s plays, which give him a chance “to communicate science to the theatergoing public,” he says. “Science is often made to be confusing, but David distills things to simple language and concepts while making it dramatic.”
Glass, who has helped coach the Harvard Debate Council, the College’s 134-year-old policy debate team, says too many scientists lack that skill. In Spare Parts, he dramatizes his concern: one character, a professor, is terrible at communicating scientific principles, which affords his breezily articulate grad student the chance to usurp some of his power. “You have to make your work understandable,” Glass says, “and you should be able to explain it to your mom.”
In his own laboratory, Glass has been examining ways to slow or halt the muscle loss that comes with aging (he is also a vice president of a biotech company), but he thinks longevity research is often “overhyped.” Spare Parts was inspired by a California clinic where people signed up for transfusions of younger people’s blood; one billionaire was getting transfusions from his son. “I thought this was too much,” Glass says.
Glass said he also wrote the play as a warning about the dangers of federal funding cuts, which he believes leave scientists beholden to the whims of billionaires who don’t care about guardrails or proper procedures. “The play makes a strong argument for publicly funded research,” he says. “We need the government involved so you have safety and regulatory guidelines.”
He wrote the grad student role with Walker in mind, sending him drafts and bringing him in for readings. One of Walker’s experiences as a scientist—an ordeal he endured trying to get a paper published—was incorporated into the play. Glass says he didn’t need to do research to understand how desperate scientists feel today. “I’d spent the past year in a lab and seeing labs being shut down and people’s fellowships up in the air because of funding cuts,” he says. “It’s infuriating to see this research being stalled or canceled, and we’ll never fully know how damaging it is to have this period of uncertainty.”
But despite his strong feelings, he says he was careful not to speechify in his script. “All those issues have to come up from the needs of the characters,” he says. As a scientist himself, he didn’t find the sentiments hard to channel. “The play is really rooted in what’s actually happening in the real world.”
