The original Star Trek was appointment television for Andrew Lau, who was a teenager when the iconic science fiction series made its debut in 1966. Then, it was purely for entertainment value. “I’m not sure at 13 I fully understood the moral lessons and the cultural lessons that were built into the shows,” he says. “At that age you’re sort of aware, but it’s built into your subconscious.”

More than 30 years later, in 2002, Lau, then an associate professor of engineering, was at a bookstore in Pittsburgh when he spotted The Ethics of Star Trek by Judith Barad and Ed Robertson. He plucked it off the shelf and, when he was about halfway through it, realized he had a platform to build a first-year seminar about the applications of ethics for engineering students. “Students in general, and especially engineering students, think they’re all the same, and they’re not,” Lau says. “Star Trek is a great vehicle for that, because of the variety of life forms in the show. It’s science fiction, which allows you to have some distance between it and you and be maybe a little more thoughtful and objective.”

Every other meeting, the class would watch an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, or the original series, and then in the following class discuss the relevancy of those episodes to ethical topics. An example: a viewing of “The Enemy Within,” in which a transporter splits Capt. Kirk into good and evil halves, allowed students to explore what it means to be a person of character.

Lau retired to emeritus status in 2021, and he saved his materials in the hope that another professor might someday continue the course. “I think that class, of all the classes I’ve taught, was probably the most fun for students, but they learned as well,” Lau says. “And one of my favorite to teach.”