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Shock result? William Shockley (centre) shared the 1956 physics Nobel with John Bardeen (left) and Walter Brattain for their work on transistors. The Moses of Silicon Valley William Shockley’s work led to the foundation of the US computer industry.

Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William In the aptly titled biography Broken Genius, now, it was unusual for a newly minted PhD to Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age Joel Shurkin reveals Shockley to be a fascina- go to an industrial laboratory. It was perhaps by Joel N. Shurkin ting example of an aristotelian tragic hero an indication that Shockley wanted his life to Macmillan Science: 2006. 400 pp. £19.99, whose flaw is readily discernible in the first have some practical impact. Besides, it was the $27.95 act. In Shockley’s case, this flaw was his over- middle of the Great Depression, and Shockley riding confidence in his own intelligence. now had a wife and family to support. Paul Grant Shockley was an only child, born in 1910 in Kelly saw that the electromechanical relays William Shockley was arguably the most enig- London to a gun-slinging mother and an MIT- that pervaded central telephone switchgear matic, provocative and controversial twentieth- educated father, a mining engineer whose at the time would not be able to handle the century US physicist. His notoriety derived search for gainful employment caused the ever-increasing traffic load. He asked his Bell both from his perceived indirect role in the family incessant relocation. As a child Shock- Labs team to find an alternative. Although invention of the transistor, alongside his fellow ley exhibited very disruptive behaviour at the 1930s was the heyday of the vacuum-tube 1956 Nobel laureates John Bardeen and Walter home, but was much better controlled in pub- amplifier, Shockley thought it might be pos- Brattain, and from his immersion in later lic (a glimpse of what was to come?). After his sible to leapfrog that technology and find life in the quagmire of the ‘race intelligence’ father’s death in the 1920s, the family returned some ‘solid state’ effect that could act as a controversy. During his productive years as a to the United States and settled in southern switching device. physicist, Shockley excelled in collecting and California. After high school, Shockley went Shurkin’s tale of the events, technical and exploiting ideas, both his own and those of his to the California Institute of Technology and behavioural, that led to the successful fabrica- colleagues, but he failed dismally in exercising later MIT in the late 1920s and early 1930s tion of the point contact and junction transistor the leadership skills required to bring them during the ‘golden age’ of physics. He was by the late 1940s is riveting, even if you know to practical fruition. He has been called by heavily influenced by the epistemological the story already. Much has been said about some the ‘Moses of Silicon Valley’ — a fitting debates of the time over determinism versus who did what and how credit should have been description in that he lured to the ‘promised probability, which may well have fuelled his properly apportioned. I once asked Bardeen land’ those who built the technical foundation later attraction to statistical techniques. this question, and he gave his usual reply: “The for today’s Information Age. But, like Moses, After obtaining his PhD from MIT in 1936, answer is in the preface to Shockley’s book.” Shockley did not himself enter the land of Shockley was recruited by Mervin Kelly, direc- There, in the opening pages of his 1950 text- milk and honey. tor of Bell Telephone Laboratories. Then, as book Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors,

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Shockley attributes the invention of the tran- soon morphed into his much-sensationalized sistor to Bardeen and Brattain, and to them NEW IN PAPERBACK claim that African-Americans are statistically alone. Bardeen had the key idea of minority Warped Passages: Unravelling the inferior in intelligence to those of European carrier injection that made amplification pos- Universe’s Hidden Dimensions descent. sible, and Brattain had the skills to put the con- by Lisa Randall (Penguin, £8.99) Had Shockley not been a Nobel laureate, his tacts close together. Yet without Shockley’s “The book’s peg — the possible existence of assertions would probably have been ignored. participation and leadership, it is equally clear extra dimensions in space — is easy enough to But a Nobel prize confers a ‘bully pulpit’, along that the invention would not have occurred as explain. But motivating the conjecture requires with the perception, by people in general and soon as it did, and his later independent inven- a grand tour of some of the toughest and most the press in particular, of being an expert in tion of the junction transistor was to emerge as abstract topics in science.” Paul Davies, Nature everything. However, as the physicist and the most practical embodiment of the device 435,1161–1162 (2005). pundit Bob Park has observed, “A Nobel prize for the next decade. in physics is not an inoculation against silly Almost immediately after the discovery of Madame Bovary’s Ovaries: A Darwinian behaviour,” and there are plenty of examples to the point-contact transistor, Shockley dissoci- Look at Literature back that up. ated himself from many of his colleagues at by David P. Barash & Nanelle R. Barash With the discovery of DNA, physics met Bell Labs, and eventually became disenchanted (Delta/Bantam Dell, $14) genetics, and the full impact of their engage- with the institution itself. Shurkin hints that “Where most such books rely on scholarly ment is just beginning to be glimpsed. If some- this was the result of jealousy at not being fully papers and monographs to ground the various day a gene sequence is found that determines involved in the final, crucial point-contact points within a shared and robust scientific intelligence, just as there are sequences for transistor experiments, and frustration at not knowledge [of evolutionary biology], these Tay-Sachs disease or thalassaemia, what shall progressing rapidly up the laboratory man- authors use literature sources as references.” we do about it? Will we have a future, as agement chain. He had, in the words of his Michel Raymond, Nature435,28 (2005). depicted in the film Gattaca, in which parents employees, an “unusual” management style. can selectively tailor the genetic structure of Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Quotations For much of the early 1950s, Shockley was their children? If most choose intelligence by W.F. Bynum & Roy Porter (Oxford on leave from Bell Labs. His time was divided as the dominant gene for their offspring, we University Press, £10.99) between teaching at Caltech and continuing to might end up with a world full of Shockleys. explore the statistical methods he introduced Hopefully, this brave new world will have its as a consultant to the military to help optimize Semiconductor had folded. Seven years later, share of those with the grace under pressure naval and air-force tactical procedures in the two of the eight, Robert Noyce and Gordon of Tiger Woods, the spine-tingling voice of Second World War. He adapted operations Moore, with financial help from the other six, Luciano Pavarotti, and the flashing fingers of research techniques with the objective of founded Intel. rock guitarist Angus Young. maximizing damage to the enemy with the Shockley’s consolation prize was a profes- Variety is indeed the spice of life. ■ least expenditure in blood and money on his sorship at Stanford, which gave him time to Paul Grant is an IBM research staff member own side, a cost–benefit approach to conduct- pursue his fascination with the possible connec- emeritus and is currently visiting scholar in applied ing warfare. tion between heredity and intelligence. This physics at Stanford University in California. Shockley’s important wartime contributions have remained largely unknown, and Shurkin provides a rare focus on them. Unlike his better- publicized peers on the Manhattan Project and at MIT’s Radiation Laboratory, Shockley Making sense of autism was virtually on the battlefield and his recom- mendations had almost immediate effect. He Autism, Brain, and Environment terms “new phase autism”. He recognizes the was undoubtedly responsible for preventing by Richard Lathe overwhelming evidence that autism is among many Allied casualties. He seemed to thrive Jessica Kingsley: 2006. 288 pp. the most heritable of psychiatric disorders, but in a leadership role within the command-and- £15.99, $24.95 argues for a two-hit mechanism, with genetic control military culture. In some bizarre sense, Understanding Autism: From Basic susceptibility and environmental factors com- he may have been cast in the mould of George Neuroscience to Treatment bining to produce an ASD. His book is a Patton, Viscount Montgomery and Ulysses S. edited by Steven O. Moldin & clearly and accessibly written account of his Grant — superb leaders of men in war, yet John L. R. Rubenstein proposal that environmental poisons, includ- mostly dismal failures in times of peace. CRC Press: 2006. 526 pp. £92, $159.95 ing heavy metals, interact with genetic vulner- After several years searching for an alter- ability to cause damage to the limbic brain native career, Shockley finally left Bell Labs Francesca Happé system and to physiological systems, includ- in 1956, returning to California to start the Are we witnessing an autism epidemic? The ing the gut and the immune system, resulting Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, with current prevalence estimates for autism, and in autism. financial backing from the industrialist Arnold for the wider range of autism spectrum disor- This is a story that many readers will find Beckman. Once more, Shockley displayed an ders (ASDs), are around ten times greater than plausible, and which Lathe supports with extraordinary gift for recruiting talent, along estimates from studies in the 1980s and 90s. some good synthesis of established autism with total incompetence in managing them. About 0.6% of the population is thought to research. It is perhaps not surprising that he Unlike Kelly, who gave his stable of thorough- have an ASD, diagnosed on the basis of quali- also cites less solid, unpublished research to breds their head, Shockley attempted to tative impairments in social interaction and support the hypothesis, nor that the limita- micromanage, forcing his agenda on his new communication, with restricted and repetitive tions of such research, such as the lack of hires, whose ideas were in fact much better interests and activities. appropriate control groups, are little discussed. than his own. In 1957, Shockley’s staff revolted, The claim that cases of ASD are on the But this is, overall, a scholarly book providing with eight — the ‘traitorous eight’ — resigning increase is the first step in Richard Lathe’s a possible explanation of autism. It will be of en masse. They were reunited by the inventor argument in Autism, Brain, and Environment. interest to parents as well as professionals. and financier Sherman Fairchild, and Fairchild Based on the apparent increase, Lathe argues Lathe’s story stands in marked contrast to Semiconductor was born. By 1961, Shockley for an environmental explanation for what he Understanding Autism, a volume edited by

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