William Shockley

William Bradford Shockley (February 13, 1910 – August 12, 1989) American physicist, eugenicist and co-inventor of the transistor with John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. His attempts to commercialize a new transistor design in the 1950s and 60s led directly to the creation of Silicon Valley. In his later life, Shockley was a "superb" professor at Stanford.http://www.pbs.org/transistor/album1/shockley/shockley3.html

Beliefs about populations and genetics

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In his later life, Shockley began giving speeches on population problems, an issue that had interested him since his wartime trips to India. In 1963 he gave a speech at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota suggesting that the people least competent to survive in the world were the ones reproducing the fastest, while the best of the human population was using birth control and having fewer children.

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In an interview with U.S. News & World Report in 1963, he "fell into the trap of discussing race," as one biographer writes.http://www.pbs.org/transistor/album1/shockley/shockley3.html

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He noted that intelligence research shows a genetic factor in intellectual capacity

Related Topics:
IQ - African American - Straw man

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He was subsequently attacked in the media, for eugenics had become unpopular after its manifestations under the Nazis in WWII. (See also and Race and intelligence)

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Shockley believed that the higher rate of reproduction among African Americans was having a "dysgenic" effect, and expressed an interest in eugenics. He thought this work was important to the genetics of the population, and came to describe it as the most important work of his career, even though it severely tarnished his reputation. Shockley's published writings on this topic, such as in Letters to the Editor of the Palo Alto Times, were largely based on the research of Cyril Burt.

Related Topics:
Dysgenic - Eugenics - Cyril Burt

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Perhaps it was his beliefs about eugenics that led him to donate sperm to the Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank founded by Robert Klark Graham in hopes of spreading humans' best genes. The bank, called by the media the "Nobel Prize sperm bank," claimed to have three Nobel Prize-winning donors, though Shockley was the only one to come forward publicly. No children were conceived with any of the Nobel Prize sperm; however, the publicity that came with Shockley's announcement created a demand for the material. This caused Graham to broaden his criteria to allow for a wider range of donors (younger, taller, and better-looking than what he referred to as the "bald little professor" stereotype of his previous donors), and a total of 215 babies were born as a result. http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-spermbank23jun05,1,1795083.story

Related Topics:
Repository for Germinal Choice - Robert Klark Graham

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Shockley had a stormy relationship with his three children. By the time of his death in 1989 of prostate cancer, he was almost completely estranged from them, and his children are reported to have learned of his death through the print media.

Related Topics:
1989 - Prostate cancer

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