The Genius Factory

by David Plotz

  Between 1960 and 1970, Shockley accomplished a remarkable reversal of reputation. At the start of the decade, Shockley was revered as a symbol of American greatness, one of the world’s greatest scientific minds, a daring businessman, a hero. By decade’s end, he was a national disgrace.

  Shockley himself didn’t seem like much of a provocateur. He discussed incendiary topics in a bizarre manner—exactly as if he were summarizing the latest advances in semiconductor research. He was the iceman. He didn’t exude hatred for blacks—he didn’t have any. He didn’t exude sorrow—he didn’t have any of that, either. Shockley’s critics assumed that his racial anxiety stemmed from some personal experience, some deep trauma, but it probably didn’t. He had no particular feelings for blacks one way or another. He hardly knew any blacks. To him, his racial conclusions were simply the logical outcome of a train of thought. As far as he was concerned, once he started to address human quality, he would follow its logic wherever it took him. In his mind, his conclusions had nothing to do with any actual black person; he was simply making an irrefutable point.

  Shockley was at once a brilliant debater and a terrible one. Every point was backed up by a statistic, every sentence a model of logic, clarity, and chill. I listened to lots of tapes of him debating other experts, and he demolished his opponent every time. Yet his snooty, meticulous manner was exactly calibrated to infuriate anyone who disagreed with him.

  Because Shockley was such a pure rationalist, he assumed that all problems were equally susceptible to his single kind of scrutiny. It never occurred to him that the “science” itself might be built on shaky premises. He believed religiously in the accuracy of IQ tests, that they measured intelligence in an absolute and total fashion. He never questioned whether an IQ test was a fitting tool of social policy. And he assumed that the “genetically enslaved” blacks led the lives of misery he ascribed to them, but he never actually talked to any of them.

  Shockley chose precisely the wrong moment to share his conclusions with America. The late 1960s had arrived, with the full flower of the civil rights movement, the rise of black power, and the student revolts. Shockley was a comically delightful villain: the scientific racist. Tiny in stature, narrow-faced, mild of manner, he made a grand foil for blacks’ anger and students’ rage. He played along, touring campuses with the enthusiasm of a hot indie rock band. He would accept any invitation. He was shouted down by black students at Dartmouth; barred from Harvard and Yale; silenced, then whisked into a police car, at the University of Kansas. His supporters were attacked at California State University, Sacramento. His face was emblazoned on “Wanted: Dead or Alive” posters. When Roots aired, five universities canceled Shockley engagements.

  William Shockley, the notorious Nobelist. Courtesy of Stanford University Archives

  At Stanford, where Shockley was a professor in the Engineering Department, students regularly demonstrated against him. They shouted “Off Pig Shockley,” pinned a list of demands to the university president’s door with a hunting knife, and burned Shockley in effigy. Shockley was unperturbed—and not-so-secretly delighted—by the rage he generated. Black protestors dressed in white Klan robes mau-maued his classroom. When his classroom was invaded, Shockley serenely interviewed the disrupters to discern their complaints, carefully chalked their demands on his blackboard, and tried to debate each one point by point. He kept asking the protestors “to formulate clearly defined questions.” When a microphone at a protest outside his office malfunctioned, Shockley cheerfully went outside and fixed it so that the anti-Shockley imprecations could continue. It surely satisfied him enormously to have all those transistors at work against him.

  Shockley found ever more inciting ways to goad his enemies. He praised Hitler’s eugenic policies: “I would think that it would be quite likely that there was some significant amount of elimination of genetic diseases [in Nazi Germany]. Just as the autobahns were a good thing, maybe there were some other good things about Hitler.”

  Shockley thought he could prove to blacks that whiteness led to intelligence. Shockley proposed to do this by measuring the percentage of “white” genes in blacks: he would show that the “whiter” the black person, the smarter he was. (Not that he had any real idea of how to test for “white” genes.) He asked NAACP leader Roger Wilkins to help him collect blood samples from members of the Congressional Black Caucus and other celebrated blacks, on the grounds that these accomplished people would surely prove to be significantly white. When Wilkins rejected him furiously, Shockley suggested that Stanford blood-test its five hundred black students. You can imagine how well that went over on campus.

  In the late 1960s, Shockley floated his “Voluntary Sterilization Bonus Plan.” The government, he said, should pay anyone with an IQ of less than 100 to be permanently sterilized—$1,000 for every IQ point under 100. (The cash would go into a trust, because such morons could not, of course, take care of the money themselves.) There would also be bonuses for bounty hunters who recruited willing candidates. At first Shockley called his sterilization plan an “intellectual exercise,” but eventually he agitated to conduct a pilot program in California.

  Naturally, Shockley beguiled Robert Graham. Shockley was not merely a Nobelist but one preaching what Graham himself believed. Graham contacted Shockley after his first controversial speech in 1965 and struck up a friendly correspondence with him. Graham sucked up to Shockley—he couldn’t help it, Graham sucked up to all men he admired—donating generously to Shockley’s Foundation for Research and Education on Eugenics and Dysgenics (FREED) and sending Shockley flattering “Dear Bill” notes.

  So when Graham decided to start collecting his supersperm, Shockley topped his list. Shockley gave Graham his first Nobel sperm, supplying a sample during a 1977 visit to southern California. Shockley donated again in 1978. Soon after, Graham wrote a letter to Shockley telling him to expect more visits as soon as women started getting pregnant. “We will resume collecting donations as soon as we have begun to utilize a good proportion of our present library. We don’t want such a superb asset to go long unutilized,” Graham wrote. He signed off the note to Shockley, “I will keep you informed if you become a father again.”

  But Graham never used Shockley’s “superb asset” again. Shockley, in fact, proved no asset at all, but Graham’s biggest liability. When the Los Angeles Times announced the Nobel bank, scientists pelted the Repository with criticism. Geneticists objected that intelligence was not purely DNA-linked and hence Nobel sperm might not make kids smarter. Andrologists observed that Nobelists were too old to be effective sperm donors. Statisticians said Graham was duping customers who thought they were getting a guaranteed genius. But these slights didn’t stick, since Graham’s idea seemed harmless, at worst. If DNA did help intelligence, then these children could get a boost from a Nobelist dad. And if DNA didn’t help intelligence, what harm was done?

  The scientific criticisms didn’t stick, but the criticism of Shockley did. The initial Times piece didn’t make anything of Shockley’s involvement. He was described only as a 1956 Nobelist in physics; his contentious second career as a racial scientist went unmentioned. But after a couple of days of favorable coverage for the Repository—or at least gape-mouthed coverage—newspapers around the country pounced on the Shockley link. Shockley turned the Nobel sperm bank from a curiosity into a menace and then into a joke. If Shockley was involved, the bank couldn’t possibly be as innocent as Graham claimed. On his own, Graham seemed a little odd—an eccentric millionaire, yes, but well meaning and perhaps even visionary. Manacled to Shockley, Graham suddenly seemed sinister. Editorial pages in practically every major city denounced Shockley as a racist and wondered if the bank was a neo-Nazi plot. The New York Post headline was typical: “Master Race Experiment.”

  A few days after Shockley’s involvement was publicized, the widow of bank cofounder Hermann Muller wrote a letter to Graham demanding that he remove Muller from the bank’s official name, the Hermann Mulle
r Repository for Germinal Choice. Shockley’s donation proved that the bank was a racist mistake, she said. Time and Newsweek mentioned the seventy-year-old Shockley’s contribution to point out that sperm from older men was much more likely to produce a Down syndrome child.

  Columnists reveled in the Shockley connection. San Francisco’s Herb Caen said it was “proof that masturbation makes you crazy.” Ellen Goodman mocked Shockley as the “Father of the Year.” Every would-be comic from Art Buchwald on down riffed on the Nobel sperm bank: there were proposals for Academy Award sperm banks, media sperm banks, elite animal sperm banks, even sperm banks that were really banks. The Boston Globe fast-forwarded to 2003, when newspaper classifieds would advertise pedigrees and stud fees: “Nuclear physicist, age 22, fee $750,000.” Roald Dahl quickly pounded out a comic novel inspired by Graham. My Uncle Oswald, set in 1919, told the story of a temptress who seduced the world’s greatest men—Renoir, Picasso, Freud, Einstein, Conrad, Shaw . . . —collected their sperm, and sold it to eager women. (Later, a Swedish novelist inspired by the Repository would imagine a similar sperm-collecting scheme at the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Stockholm.)

  Saturday Night Live ridiculed Shockley and the bank in a skit entitled “Dr. Shockley’s House of Sperm,” starring Rodney Dangerfield as himself. In the skit, Dangerfield was the most popular donor at “Shockley’s House of Sperm”—a sperm bank whose wide selection trumped that of “Jizz World” and “Jelly Barn.” Clerks pleaded with customers to buy “some Linus Pauling”; they offered a sale on “the David Susskind.” But all anyone wanted was Rodney Dangerfield, Rodney Dangerfield, Rodney Dangerfield. Meanwhile, in the back room, Rodney was getting exhausted as order after order piled up: “Are you kidding? I can’t. No way! No way! You kidding? It can’t be done! . . . You’re gonna kill the goose that laid the golden egg!”

  Shockley adored the attention. It had been several years since he had made headlines, and he was delighted to be causing trouble again. Shockley, not Graham, became the public face of the sperm bank throughout 1980. Shockley, not Graham, was interviewed on Good Morning America and Donahue. (Shockley had the presence of mind to mock himself on Donahue. He stood up, all five feet, six inches of him, shed his suit jacket, and turned in a full circle in front of the audience. “It would be ridiculous for me to say I was a superman.”

  The bank and Shockley became inextricably linked in the public mind, and that proved disastrous for Graham. Despite his occasional flashes of wit, as on Donahue, Shockley mostly used his media appearances as occasions to appall his audiences. He spouted his racist theories of dysgenics and showed off charts of whites’ and blacks’ reproductive rates. He described the potential Nobel Prize babies as a “crop” and demonstrated his wonderful paternal instincts by expressing not a whiff of interest in the sperm bank children he might father. He cooperated with all journalists who called, to ill effect. He even sat for a profile in Hustler magazine. It began with memorable cruelty:

  Jacking off for mankind! Somehow the scene comes off as comic, and maybe even a little sad: Imagine hand lotion or box of tissues at hand, and, of course, to excite the scientific imagination—a visual aid. A copy of Hustler perhaps. Confident in what he is doing, Shockley urgently pumps and pumps.

  Outside a few feet distant, stands a California multimillionaire named Robert Graham. He is 73 and dressed in a business suit. With him is a white-jacketed technician, at the ready. They wait anxiously.

  At length—success!

  The door to the room opens. Shockley, who once opened the door to America’s manned-space-flight program and a host of electronic marvels by helping to invent the transistor, shuffles out and hands over the warm specimen, a sticky splotch of semen deposited in a small plastic bag.

  Playboy subjected Shockley to its famous interview in August 1980—Bo Derek was on the cover. In the course of it, Shockley admitted he hadn’t known that sperm from older men carried a higher risk of birth defects. He also told Playboy about his disappointment in his own children, managing to insult his kids, humiliate his wife, and aggrandize himself, all at once. “In terms of my own capacities, my children represent a very significant regression. My first wife—their mother—had not as high an academic achievement standing as I had.”

  Shockley’s return to notoriety didn’t last long. He made a brief, and hilariously bad, run for the U.S. Senate in 1982 as the “Anti-Dysgenic Candidate,” finishing seventh in the California Republican primary with only 7,000 votes. He embarked on bizarre projects, including commissioning a novel that was supposed to do for genetic decline what Uncle Tom’s Cabin had done for slavery. (His author, a dentist’s wife, wrote the first chapters of Huntsville: A Journey into Darkness before the project foundered.) He belittled his great physics research: dysgenics, he declared, was far more important than the transistor. His innate suspicion degenerated into paranoia. He taped every telephone call. He forced reporters to take a statistics quiz before he would agree to an interview.

  Shockley, who had hobnobbed with kings and dazzled the world’s greatest minds, ended in the gutter of American politics, allied with cranks and racists. During his senate campaign, the KKK offered to rally in Shockley’s support and canceled only when Shockley’s lawyer dissuaded them. Neo-Nazi newspapers took to reprinting Shockley’s writings. When Shockley won a libel suit against an Atlanta columnist who had compared him to Hitler, the jury awarded him only $1 in damages: Shockley was such spoiled goods, the verdict seemed to say, that his reputation couldn’t be damaged.

  The Repository for Germinal Choice never received another vial of Shockley’s sperm after 1978. This was a shame, a former Repository employee told me, because Shockley’s sperm “quality”—if not his “human quality”—was very high. But after the Playboy interview, Shockley was spooked by the idea that his geriatric sperm might have health problems. He didn’t want to donate until the Repository gave him a more thorough physical. It never happened.

  The mocking and alarmist media coverage took its toll on Robert Graham and his sperm bank. When Shockley’s involvement was publicized, protestors descended on Graham’s estate, chanting outside his iron gates. Graham and his wife fled the protests and hired round-the-clock Pinkertons to guard his precious sperm. Baffled by the public rage, Graham retreated from the press. He ducked interviews for two years. His dream had become a farce.

  Graham’s other two Nobel donors quit when the bank went public; they feared a Shockley-style mauling. So by late 1980, Graham found himself presiding over a Nobel Prize sperm bank that had no Nobel Prize donors, no Nobel Prize sperm left in storage (it had all been shipped out), and no Nobel Prize babies. None of the first three women who’d been inseminated with Nobel sperm had gotten pregnant. In fact no one inseminated with the Nobel sperm ever got pregnant. The Nobel Prize sperm bank would never produce a single Nobel baby.

  The bad publicity did not deter those who mattered most to Graham: customers. Every day the Nobel sperm bank was flayed in the press. But every day more applications—applications from desperate women—arrived at Graham’s office.

  And Graham remained an irrepressible evangelist for his cause. He had customers but no Nobelists, so now he needed some new seed—some dazzling, backflipping, 175 IQ sperm—to give them. Graham was nothing if not a canny businessman. He had built a multimillion-dollar eyeglasses company that depended on a fickle public’s taste. He understood that he had to please his customers. This was a radical notion in the fertility trade, where doctors were accustomed to bossing around their forlorn infertile patients. Graham had begun with the notion of limiting his clientele to women who belonged to Mensa or had an IQ of at least 120. “I don’t want a whole flock of ordinary women,” he had declared. Graham quickly ditched that plan. If he wanted a popular bank, he realized, he would have to take any woman—or at least any married woman with an infertile husband—who applied.

  More important, Graham had learned that his customers didn’t share his enthusiasm for brainiacs. The N
obelists had afflicted Graham with three problems he hadn’t anticipated: first, there were too few of them to meet the demand; second, they were too old, which raised the risk of genetic abnormalities and cut their sperm counts (a key reason why their seed didn’t get anyone pregnant); third, they were too eggheaded. Even the customers of the Nobel sperm bank sought more than just big brains from their donors. Sure, sometimes his applicants asked how smart a donor was. But they usually asked how good-looking he was. And they always asked how tall he was. Nobody, Graham saw, ever chose the “short sperm.” Graham realized he could make a virtue of necessity. He could take advantage of his Nobel drought to shed what he called the bank’s “little bald professor” reputation. Graham began to hunt for Renaissance men instead—donors who were younger, taller, and better-looking than the laureates. “Those Nobelists,” he would say scornfully, “they could never win a basketball game.”