The Genius Factory

by David Plotz

  Joy had just read the Harry Potter books. She told her mom that she thought Donor White was like Dumbledore, the kindly old wizard. Joy was curious to meet Donor White, but she was ten years old and busy. She didn’t think about it much.

  A year after the conversation, Beth happened across one of my Slate articles. She realized she had one last chance to find Donor White, and she called me.

  I agreed to help her. I published “A Mother Searches for ‘Donor White’ ” in Slate on February 27, 2001. In the article, Beth said she wanted Donor White to know that Joy was a sweet and enthusiastic girl. That she was “kind of competitive.” That she played soccer and “is all over the field.” That she was very pretty. That she “does well in all of her subjects, but social science interests her most.” That teachers liked her but she also had lots of friends. That she was taking riding lessons. That “she puts her heart into life.”

  At the end of the article, I listed my e-mail address and phone number and invited Donor White or any other families that had used Donor White sperm to contact me. (Beth was also hoping to find siblings for Joy.) I had never been so certain in my journalistic life. I was sure Donor White would stumble across it or that a friend who knew his secret would see it and tell him. At the very least, I knew that another Donor White family would contact me and give Joy a brother or sister. It couldn’t fail—there was too much karma on its side: a darling eleven-year-old girl, hoping for a grandpa!

  I have never received such a response to a story. E-mails poured in from around the world: other sperm bank kids wishing for Donor White as a father, other sperm donors praying that their children were searching for them, other mothers heartbroken for Beth and Joy. TV requests piled up in my in-box—Primetime Live, Unsolved Mysteries, and countless documentary makers begged Beth and Joy to go on the air. Donor White would be sure to see them, the producers promised.

  Beth and I were both optimistic. But the months slipped by, and we heard nothing. I called Beth. She was so frustrated that she was considering doing one of the TV shows. She thought television might be a better way to reach him than the Web. Donor White is in his late sixties by now, she said, and maybe he doesn’t use the Internet.

  Or maybe he’s dead, I thought.

  CHAPTER 6

  BIRTH OF A NOBEL SPERM BANK CELEBRITY

  Robert Graham strikes his favorite pose. Eric Myer

  February 29, 1980, the day of the Repository for Germinal Choice’s public debut, was a triumph for Robert Graham—a nation enthralled, Nobelists enlisted to the cause, marvelous sperm chilling in the freezer, Mensa women lining up to acquire it. That was the Nobel sperm bank’s first great day, and its last one. Disaster struck immediately, in the person of William Shockley.

  By admitting to the Los Angeles Times that he had donated, Nobel Laureate Shockley had rescued Graham from humiliation. He had proved that though Graham might be a kook, he wasn’t a fraud. Later Graham would say that he was “eternally indebted” to Shockley: “He was the one person who saved me from looking like the country’s champion liar.” But in saving Graham, Shockley condemned the sperm banker to a greater disgrace.

  We live in William Shockley’s world. As a scientist, he invented the transistor and lit the fuse on the information age. Before Shockley, the radio was elephantine, manned space flight was fantasy, computers were preposterously large, clunky, and expensive. His transistor changed everything. Later, as a businessman, Shockley midwifed the birth of Silicon Valley and kicked off the greatest commercial revolution in American history. He brought the country’s most promising young scientists to California and set them to work solving practical problems. Shockley’s shock troops would go on to create the most important technology companies in the world. For these two achievements, Shockley deserves the world’s gratitude. But as a—who knows what, really: philosopher? gadfly? racist?—Shockley squandered that goodwill and made himself one of the memorably noxious public figures of the twentieth century.

  Born in 1910, Shockley was the only child of a wealthy old British mining engineer and his gutsy young American wife, May Shockley. May had graduated from Stanford and then worked as a mineral surveyor in roughneck Utah mining camps. May transmitted her ambitious vigor to her son. She indulged him, worshiped him, dominated him. From his infancy, she told him, “Bill, go set the world on fire.” Shockley was a cocky baby who became a cocky man. Pictures show a masterful child, his arms crossed, his legs akimbo like a tiny colossus. His parents couldn’t control him; kids in his Palo Alto neighborhood couldn’t stand him; but he was dazzlingly smart. (Though when Stanford professor Fred Terman recruited for his famous study of gifted children, Shockley didn’t make the cut. His 129 IQ was too low, a slight that Shockley carried with him to the grave.)

  Shockley’s father died when he was a teenager, an event that seems to have left no impression on him at all. Moving to Los Angeles, on the other hand, did. Shockley attended Hollywood High at the height of the Jazz Age. The blossoming movie industry entranced him. Shockley cultivated a cinematic conception of himself, a kind of posturing that stuck with him throughout his life. According to one friend quoted in Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson’s excellent history of the transistor, Crystal Fire, Shockley styled himself as a cross between “Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Bulldog Drummond, with perhaps a dash of Ronald Colman.” He swashbuckled his way through high school and college, driving a stylish De Soto roadster and packing a pistol—for no reason other than to have it. Shockley treated every social encounter as a chance to show off, demonstrate his intellectual superiority, razzle-dazzle boys with a magic trick, flirt with girls.

  He had the brains to match the style. He raced through Caltech studying physics, then, inspired by quantum mechanics, headed east to earn a speedy doctorate at MIT in 1936. When Bell Labs, the world’s greatest institution of practical science, lifted its Depression-era hiring freeze, Shockley was the first man it called. It assigned Shockley to improve its vacuum tubes, the expensive, cumbersome backbone of Ma Bell’s phone network.

  World War II interrupted. Shockley soon demonstrated the ruthless thoroughness that would define his career. Shockley believed that anything—a physics conundrum, a conversation, even a person—could be reconfigured as a series of logical problems. When he bought a boat, for example, he devised logical rules for steering it—a system of scientific sailing. He knew that unfettered rationality would always find the right answer. Dispatched as an adviser to the Navy, Shockley was appalled at its haphazard methods of hunting German U-boats. So Shockley devised an algorithm that instructed when, how, and how often to drop depth charges. The Americans’ U-boat kill ratio jumped sevenfold. Later, Shockley devised a new formula for targeting and dropping high-altitude bombs. The Navy awarded him its highest civilian prize. Decades later, when his critics tarred him as a Nazi-sympathizing white supremacist, Shockley gleefully reminded them of his medal.

  After the war, Shockley took command of Bell Labs’ effort to build a “solid-state” amplifier, a device that could amplify signals like a vacuum tube but be smaller, cheaper, cooler, faster, and more reliable. In late 1947, two of his subordinates, Walter Brattain and John Bardeen, built the first working transistor, a piece of germanium (a close cousin of silicon) attached to two small wires. It could amplify a signal like a vacuum tube did—one hundred times as much electrical power came out of the first transistor as went in—but required a fraction of the space and energy.

  Shockley grabbed the credit for his underlings’ work, but secretly he was infuriated that Bardeen and Brattain had made the discovery without his help. Over New Year’s, Shockley locked himself in a room in Chicago’s Bismarck Hotel and spent three days figuring out how to improve Bardeen and Brattain’s invention. Shockley devised a better device called a “junction transistor.” His junction transistor would be infinitely easier to manufacture and use. His transistor—not the “point-contact transistor” of Bardeen and Brattain—would eventually revolutionize electronics, c
omputers, and practically everything else in the world.

  In June 1948, Bell Labs announced the transistor, but hardly anyone noticed. Shockley’s colleagues and other physicists considered the transistor to be simply a one-for-one substitute for vacuum tubes. It would do little but shrink radios and telephone networks. Shockley was practically the only person who understood its significance. He predicted, with astonishing insight, that the transistor would become the “ideal nerve cell” of small, vastly more powerful computers. It took decades for the rest of the world to recognize what Shockley knew immediately: that this was the most important invention of his lifetime. (Bill Gates has said, “My first stop on any time travel expedition would be Bell Labs in December 1947.”)

  By the early 1950s, Shockley’s junction transistors had graduated from obscurity to the mass market, manufactured by the thousands and millions. (They were made of silicon, which worked better than germanium.) Portable transistor radios flooded into the United States from Japan. Fortune magazine declared 1953 the Year of the Transistor.

  But Shockley seethed. He couldn’t profit from his invention, because Bell Labs owned its employees’ patents. His showmanship and credit hogging alienated Bardeen, Brattain, and his other Bell Labs colleagues. So in 1955, Shockley quit Bell, moved home to Palo Alto, and started his own company, Shockley Semiconductor.

  Shockley brought the silicon to Silicon Valley. His arrival rang the opening bell for the Valley’s boom, what Michael Lewis has called “the greatest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet.” Housed in a Quonset hut in Mountain View, Shockley Semiconductor wasn’t the first high-tech company in the area—Hewlett-Packard beat it by sixteen years—but it introduced the transistor technology that would make Silicon Valley great. Shockley planned to manufacture better transistors, but what was more important was how he intended to do it. In the age of the Organization Man, Shockley had unusual ideas: His company would be run by scientists, not businessmen. It would pay well for talent. It would work fast. It would prize creativity over routine competence, and everyone would judge, ruthlessly, the work of his peers.

  Shockley had an amazing eye for talent. His systematic brain had devised metrics for scientific productivity and he hired only applicants who scored high. He also ran his applicants through a battery of psychological tests. Shockley, one of the most famous scientists in the world, awed his young recruits: meeting him was “like talking to God,” said Robert Noyce. Shockley hired a dozen of the best young minds in the country, including the amazing trio of Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Eugene Kleiner, and set up shop.

  On November 1, 1956, a year after Shockley Semiconductor opened, Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics “for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect.” It was one of the rare occasions when the Nobel board recognized a scientific breakthrough soon after it occurred.

  The prize anointed Shockley as a symbol of American greatness. When Life magazine wanted to depict American scientific progress, it published the iconic photograph of Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain demonstrating the first transistor. When Congress needed someone to discuss the future of American science post-Sputnik, it called Shockley.

  Shockley loved his new celebrity. He was a born showman. He would hand out transistors to his audiences. He liked to do magic tricks at the podium, making bouquets of flowers appear and disappear as he spoke. He possessed the knack of explaining science with what Tom Wolfe described as “homely but shrewd” examples. This is Wolfe’s account of Shockley on amplification: “If you take a bale of hay and tie it to the tail of a mule and then strike a match and set the bale of hay on fire, and if you then compare the energy expended shortly thereafter by the mule with the energy expended by yourself in striking the match, you will understand the concept of amplification.”

  Shockley, in a hint of what was to come, used his national pulpit to lobby for a scientific aristocracy. The American public was too democratic, divided, and stupid to make complex decisions, he said. Instead there should be an Institute of Public Enlightenment, a board of wise men that would objectively analyze complex issues and then use advertising to persuade Americans how to think about them. It was pure Shockley, populist marketing techniques to serve elitist goals.

  As Shockley’s public star ascended, his business collapsed. Shockley was a disastrously bad businessman and a worse manager. Shockley Semiconductor didn’t manage to manufacture a single transistor. Shockley’s employees detested him. After proposing to abolish hierarchy, Shockley built a dictatorship. He had promised his charges intellectual freedom, then bullied and abused them. In a hideously misconceived effort at openness, Shockley posted all salaries on a bulletin board, which embarrassed those who were highly paid and annoyed those who weren’t. Shockley husbanded all the juiciest research for himself, hiding his results even from his employees.

  Shockley’s suspicion of his employees twisted into paranoia. When someone scratched a hand on a thumbtack, Shockley was convinced a plot was afoot. He forced some employees to take lie detector tests: Had they placed the guilty tack? Finally, on September 18, 1957, eight of his top scientists quit. In the original example of the entrepreneurial gumption and institutionalized disloyalty that now defines the Silicon Valley, they immediately founded a rival company, Fairchild Semiconductor. Shockley called the quitters the “Traitorous Eight,” and he took his rage against them to the grave.

  At Fairchild, the Traitorous Eight took Shockley’s original but betrayed ideals and turned them into practice. Fairchild really did abolish hierarchy. Offices: gone, replaced by cubicles. Reserved parking spaces: gone. Dress code: gone. Anyone could make a decision; anyone could test a new idea. Their Anti-Shockley culture remade the American economy. At Fairchild, Noyce developed the integrated circuit, the method of linking transistors that made Shockley’s imagined supercomputers a reality. Fairchild eventually fractured and seeded the valley. Noyce and Gordon Moore established Intel, where they created the most important hardware company in the world (and where Moore devised “Moore’s Law,” a conceptual framework for the computer revolution). Others of the Traitorous Eight built Teledyne, another Valley semiconductor shop. Eugene Kleiner founded Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venture capital giant. Kleiner was the Johnny Appleseed of Silicon Valley culture. His VC investments spread the anti-Shockley ethos to virtually every important technology company of the past thirty years, including Sun Microsystems, Compaq, Amazon, and Google.

  Shockley was the bastard father of the New Economy, but he himself foundered. His semiconductor company barely survived the Traitorous Eight’s mutiny and limped along unproductively until the early 1960s. Shockley was in a funk. His own family didn’t matter much to him; he had three children by the first of his two wives and mostly neglected them. His mother had ordered him to set the world on fire; he had done it once, but now the glory had dissipated and so he needed to do it again. The Nobel Prize honors its winners for “conferring the greatest benefit on all mankind.” Shockley often cited this line as his inspiration. He took it not merely as a compliment but as an instruction. He would remake mankind, whether mankind wanted it or not.

  Shockley was searching for a cause, and, in 1963, he found it. Ever since a wartime trip to India, Shockley had worried about overpopulation and vigorously supported birth control and abortion rights. In March 1963, Shockley saw a San Francisco Chronicle story entitled “Weird Attack Maims Shopkeeper.” A hoodlum named Rudy “The Brute” Hoskins had burst into a San Francisco deli and tossed lye into the face of the owner, Harry Goldman, blinding him in one eye. It turned out that an ex-boyfriend of Goldman’s girlfriend had promised Hoskins $400 to toss the acid (though paid him only $2). Shockley was mesmerized by the details of Hoskins’s life: Hoskins was black. His “mentally dull” mother had an IQ of only 65. She had seventeen children but could remember the names of only nine of them. Shockley, rather than blaming the obvious villain—the cree
p ex-boyfriend who had paid for the attack—suddenly saw the world anew.

  The problem was not that there were too many people on the planet, Shockley concluded. The problem was that there were too many of the wrong people on the planet (like Rudy Hoskins and his mom), and they were breeding too fast. With his systematic brain, Shockley immediately outlined the problem, named it “The Problem of Human Quality,” and set about solving it. Shockley reached much the same conclusion that Robert Graham was reaching a few hundred miles south. The planet was being destroyed by “dysgenics.” In better, bygone days, genetic failures like Rudy Hoskins’s mother would have died before childbearing age. Now, thanks to what Shockley liked to call “humanitarianism gone berserk,” society not only kept these imbeciles alive but paid them through wel-fare programs to have more children. Like Graham, Shockley discounted the fact that Americans were richer, healthier, and better educated than ever before.

  It was no accident that Shockley developed his eugenic fixation at the same time as Graham. They were men cut from the same starched cloth. Like Graham, Shockley had been a giant in the 1950s, a scientific businessman in an age when there was no cooler job. Like Graham, Shockley had been fawned over as a wise man. And like Graham, Shockley started to fear the genetic decline of the U.S. population at the moment that Americans decided to stop listening to men like him.

  Through the mid-1960s, Shockley laid out his dysgenic fears in articles and university lectures. In U.S. News & World Report, he wondered, “Is the Quality of the U.S. Population Declining?” Year after year, he petitioned the National Academy of Sciences to commission a study on American genetic decline.

  Because he was a Nobel laureate, Shockley’s theories about “human quality” were respectfully tolerated, but without great interest. He craved more attention, and he pushed until he found a way to make America really listen. He started talking more about race. Shockley had originally framed America’s “quality” problems in generic terms: anyone could have a low IQ. But by the late 1960s, Shockley had narrowed his focus to the intellectual inadequacy of blacks. Shockley coined a phrase, “The Tragedy for the American Negro,” that he repeated, mantralike, approximately every ten minutes. Black Americans, Shockley said, had an average IQ 12 points lower than whites’. As a result, few blacks could perform demanding jobs, and too many blacks were imbeciles. Social welfare programs and better education could not correct this problem; it was genetic. Blacks, Shockley said, were “genetically enslaved” to their poor DNA, condemned to lives of misery, poverty, and crime. These ideas about black intelligence didn’t originate with Shockley; he built on the work of controversial social scientists—notably Arthur Jensen and Richard Herrnstein—who had been combing intelligence test data. Shockley viewed himself as a popularizer of their ideas. In fact, he was more of an unpopularizer. Their arid journal articles mostly escaped notice, but Shockley’s inflammatory rhetoric, catchy phrases, and provocations enraged Americans.