We all knew William Shockley was a disgusting racist, using bad biology to argue for bad goals, but he was the co-inventor of the transistor! He won a Nobel prize for his work in a field unrelated to biology! So while my friends and I were willingly calling him out as a fraud, a liar, and a racist while we were out for beers, all the major scientific publications were more mealy-mouthed and ingratiating, which was annoying. It was partly out of misplaced politeness, but also that a lot of the white male old guard were probably sympathetic to his ideas.
Maybe that’s changing. Science has published an editorial apologizing for their past indifference/support for Shockley, and promising to do better. They’re calling out the racists and phonies.
Shockley was part of a cadre of physicists who advanced ideas outside of their area of expertise to promote a right-wing agenda. He was a close friend of Frederick Seitz—president of both the National Academy of Sciences and Rockefeller University—who, following a career in physics, became a purveyor of misinformation on tobacco, nuclear weapons, and climate change. Like Shockley, Seitz carried out his nonphysics work through op-eds and conservative think tanks, not through the accepted mechanism of peer review that he used in doing physics. Seitz was not, at least publicly, as overtly in favor of eugenics as was Shockley, but he was a strong advocate for genetic determinism, even claiming at the behest of the cigarette industry that tobacco itself was not harmful because genetics determined whether smokers would ultimately contract lung cancer.
Sound familiar? There are many ‘scientists’ getting checks from right-wing think tanks right now, although most of them are now busy with careers in vaccine and climate change denialism. The words have changed but the song is much the same. Let’s see Science start calling out more of the living hucksters and propagandists for the far right. But for now, I’m reasonably happy with their apology for propping up a dead one.
Following Shockley’s death in 1989, Nature correctly called out his racism in an obituary, but then published a letter from Seitz defending Shockley and claiming that the reason Shockley became a eugenicist was because of physical trauma he experienced in a near-fatal car accident. When Science wrote about this dustup, it referred to Shockley’s ideas as merely “unpopular” and “extremely controversial.” It then ran a letter from an even more notorious eugenicist, J. Philippe Rushton, who argued that by merely covering the disagreement at Nature, Science was delivering an “ad hominem attack.” In addition to an ill-advised decision to publish Rushton’s letter, Science posted a response saying, “no criticism of Shockley was intended.” Yikes.
Looking back, it’s clear that what was intended as an attempt to make room for dissent and discussion only served to abet Shockley and his cohorts in their effort to build support for eugenics. Science gave them a platform and inadequate scorn. The lesson is that we at Science need to make more effort to think about everything that we do, not only from the standpoint of communicating science to the public, but also as an organization that above all, supports all of humanity. The process of science is one of continual revision, but it’s also one that must have a conscience.
It was only a few months ago, in a commentary on racism in science by Ebony Omotola McGee, that Shockley was described in our pages in the terms he deserved. But as recently as 2001, Science described him simply as a “transistor inventor and race theorist.” That won’t cut it anymore. As of today, a link to this editorial will appear along with any mention of Shockley in this journal.
Make no mistake. Shockley was a racist. Shockley was a eugenicist. That’s all.
That’s a pretty good apology: admitting the mistake, taking the blame for it, and planning an action to correct their error. Not that it will stop all the modern ‘race realists’ from relying on old boobs like Shockley and Rushton in their arguments.
The good people over at Science-Based Medicine do a great job of calling out the professional vaccine deniers, who, by COMPLETE coincidence, serve a right-wing agenda….
Yeah, IMO this kind of attitude is poisoning science and slowly killing it. William Shockley was the winner of a scientific lottery where he was born at the right time and he happen to be in the right place to study a new-emerging less-studied area which was ripe with low hanging fruits and ripe for fast progress. Thousands of other people would have done the same thing and would have achieved the same accomplishments. He should be regarded as someone who did his job and someone who discovered what he was supposed to discovered, not some fucking “genius” who revolutionized the world by his “genius”, “intelligence” and so on because as his non-scientific comments show, he’s probably just another idiot.
A real apology. Wow!
Not a “we are sorry if anyone took offense”. but a real apology
It’s a stretch, I know, but I can’t help comparing Shockley with the noted German physicists Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark, who violently opposed Einstein’s “Jewish physics” on anti-Semitic grounds.
It is noteworthy that the leadership at Science is no longer dominated by old white men – https://www.aaas.org/governance#bod
This is why diversity in the sciences is important, particularly at the leadership level. This has been a huge change over the last ~20 years and I expect we’re going to see a lot of positive things come of it. This editorial by Holden Thorp is indicative of that.
I can’t help noticing that Shockley was American and so was Science magazine, whereas Nature is British. Always harder to condemn one’s fellow citizens, but all the more necessary!
You start out in 1954 by saying, “N****r, n****r, n****r.”
By 1968 you can’t say “n****r”—that hurts you, backfires.
So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and
all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re
talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re
talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct
of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want
to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing
thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N****r,
n****r.”
– Lee Atwater
Today we are fighting anti-CRT hysteria, passing bad laws preventing teaching of real American history in schools, and the bad bits thereof. Anti-Wokism laws and more, such as in Florida.
We are moving from bad racist science to attacks on honest historians and legal scholars.
Christopher F. Rufo
@realchrisrufo
The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the
newspaper and immediately think “critical race theory.”
We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex
the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular
with Americans.
2:17 PM . March 17, 2021. Twitter
Scholarship and academia are under attack. And thanks to people like Atwater and Rufo, far more dangerous than people like Shockley ever were.
He may have invented the first transistor, but the transistor he invented wasn’t a very good transistor. It was made of germanium not silicon. It was a point contact device that relied on a hair thin piece of wire being in exactly the right place. It wasn’t very robust. It took a lot of work by other people to get the MOSFETs and BJTs that run the world today.
As a side note, Shockley’s co-inventors of the transistor, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, are usually considered the real inventors of the device. Shockley, who was their boss at Bell Labs, bullied his way onto the patent as an equal partner even while the other two had done the actual work and at one point, tried to be considered the sole inventor. This alienated Bardeen and Brattain who would have nothing more to do with him. Shockley went on to create a different type of transistor but the ground work had already been done;
If I had my druthers, any journalist writing at length about anything to do with Silicon Valley would familiarize themselves with Shockley, and keep in mind the context of a legacy of white supremacy deeply entwined with the intellectual roots of the place.
drsteve @ # 9 – Shockley schmockley. How often do Silicon Valley articles even mention the Cold War or the military-industrial complex?
While we’re damning Shockley and Seitz to secular perdition, give a thought to Art Robinson, buddy of Seitz, with whom he created the Oregon Petition of climate change denialism. Robinson is my Oregon State Senator.
What should be taken from this is that writing/advocating outside of one’s expertise should garner no transferred Sense of Authority from the writing/advocating within one’s expertise. (This is a close relative of the Argument From Authority fallacy, but doesn’t quite fit the parameters of the fallacy.) tl;dr Platforms have subject-matter limits; what Kareem Abdul-Jabbar says about the 1970s experiences of black professional athletes does not give him authority on (hypothetically) the music-industry experiences of Latinx women today, let alone the “merits” of their music.†
What should not be taken from this is that being A Complete Jerk makes everything else one has done — especially in areas not directly related to the jerkitude — Complete Garbage. I can (and do) despise Ezra Pound the man and traitor; Ernest Hemingway the abuser (physically and mentally); and on, and on, and on, without evaluating their unrelated writings as garbage just due to the author-identity. (I choose to evaluate Hemingway as mostly barely-above garbage on its own merits, or lack thereof.)
Now whether Shockley’s reputation in his field should suffer for his mistreatment of those he supervised in “creating” the transistor — that is, for conduct directly within his field — is a much closer, and harder, question. It’s a question as to Shockley that I don’t have enough facts to answer, and wonder how much of the way we look at it was due at least in part to the changed definitions of “inventorship” in the 1952 Patent Act. (Prior to the 1952 Act, it was mandatory to name the equivalent of a lab supervisor as a coinventor, or the application could/would be rejected for failure to identify all inventors, and a granted patent later rescinded on motion for such failure. Things Have Changed Since, both regarding the neepery of patent practice and the default perceptions of a “lab supervisor”‘s role in inventive process.)
† Example chosen precisely because Abdul-Jabbar has generally shown great restraint in attempting to assert Authority. Unfortunately, most of the other examples I came up with quickly… have not.
To a great degree we have a human nature problem in science to do with attribution.
When people do good work they want to claim it. We consider the person and the good work as entangled. It leads to multiple abuses.
The Darwin abuse – because Darwin was wrong about race etc then evolution is wrong (simple ad hom).
– because Darwin’s work is incorrect or has gaps then modern evolution is wrong (argument from authority bashing ? )
The Elon Musk abuse – because Elon Musk buys the work of others who are less well known he gets attributed and is seen publicly as a genius. This is a compounding of Darwin abuse with popularity problems.
First up, let me heartily concur with the OP in celebrating the nature, and rarity of an apology that actually apologizes. Well done Science.
However, I am less hearty about the pile-on on Shockley’s own contributions. We are all too familiar with the way in which conservative commentators talk crap along the lines “Noam Chomsky is a leftist looney – and anyway his theory of phrase structured grammars is wrong”. So let’s be a bit careful here. Shockley was a horrible, horrible human being, no question. However, his contribution to the understanding of charge transport in semiconductors, i.e. band-gap theory, is pretty secure.
Jaws @12:
The 1948 patent for the point-contact transistor names only Bardeen and Brattain, not Shockley.
cafebabe @14: Seconded.
Ok scientists are Real People (TM). Some real people are assholes .Robert Jastrow comes to mind and racist Watson of Watson and Crick fame . I agree that excusing their asshole behavior just because they discovered a great science fact, has got to stop!
cafebabe–
Except nobody is asking for his Nobel to be revoked or his papers on electronics to be retracted. No matter how much people dislike him, his record is secure and will continue to be secure unless someone uncovers evidence of research fraud, which would be highly unlikely at this point.
There has been criticism of his Nobel award — you can see some of this upthread — but even so, the arguments presented are based on him bullying his name onto key papers, not on how awful his views on race were.
@ jaws #8
I’ve never heard that.
A Google search did not confirm it either.
Wikipedia summarizes the 1952 law without any mention of redefining inventorship.
Do you have a reference for this? The controlling legal document for patent law is a lot older than that. It is in the US Constitution.
There is nothing about lab directors here.
This is Wikipedia’s summary of the Patent Act of 1952.
I don’ see anything about changing the definition of inventorship.
Jaws@12–
Yes, we have to be careful about giving unwarranted deference to people talking outside their area of expertise, but it’s a really complex problem. I love the Wikipedia entry on Sultor, ne ultra crepidam, the ancient Roman catchphrase about sticking to your field of knowledge — especially for Karl Marx’s great objection that by trade James Watt was a watchmaker, Richard Arkwright a barber, and Robert Fulton a jeweller.
Anyway, I’d also add that we can’t always trust people within their field of expertise. Examples that come to mind are Fred Hoyle, Peter Duesberg, and the scientists who objected to Stanley Prusiner’s Nobel Prize.
Essentially, we have to apply skeptical appraisal even to experts in their field, and not dismiss people just because they come from a different field. Definitely not always easy!
Among Shockley’s various talents, he climbed mountains, and living in the East Coast, he honed his skills by climbing on the Shawangunk cliffs above New Paltz, NY. In 1953, he made the first ascent of a classic overhanging route which became known as “Shockley’s Ceiling.” Rock climbers (like me) are not distinguished by their deep cerebration, and it took until 2020 before the name was changed. But the name was altered in the rock climbing guidebook to “The Ceiling aka Shockley’s Ceiling.” Which causes confusion all around.
@15, 19, 20:
A series of regulations and the examiner’s manual, starting in the 1930s, established a lot of detail, such as the actual-supervisor requirement where there was an actual supervisor. (You won’t find it at Wikipedia. Wikipedia is just as trustworthy for legal research, especially on procedural niceties, as Shockley was on eugenics.) There was also case law that reinforced that failure to name the actual, hands-on lab supervisor risked the validity of the patent, if challenged within three years after patent issuance by a party accused of infringement. “Correction of inventorship” was an entirely different proceeding with a shorter lifespan under older law, and is how Shockley would have had to proceed — on his own dime (lawyers were somewhat cheaper back then).
I infer one, or perhaps more, of three things (they’re all credible, but would require documentation):
• Shockley attempted to amend the patent application to name himself, but the company (which actually filed the patent application) determined that he wasn’t the actual supervisor of that lab activity and refused to acquiesce; or
• There was a confidential settlement of some kind in which Shockley agreed not to further contest the matter; or
• The time/circumstances at which Shockley discovered the problem would have left him only a correction-of-inventorship action, and either cost or other considerations kept him from doing so within the required time limit (one year after issuance if I recall correctly)
Or there could be something else entirely that I’ve missed, as I wasn’t a patent practitioner in the late 1940s when this all was at issue.
@7
It was even lamer than that, honestly. From my understanding the development of the first transistor went kind of like this: “Huh.. that crystal we are growing seems to give off a current when exposed to light…”, followed by a bit of testing that determined that they had discovered diodes. The “breakthrough” that made it a transistor was purely one of, “I wonder what would happen if we grew it a bit different, so that it had 3 junctions we could attach wires to, instead of 2?” No one involved sat down, worked out complex mathematical models, or “predicted” this was going to be the result. It was shear accident, of the exact same sort as, “I wonder what happens if you take that old failed attempt by some guy a few years back to make iodine and mixed it with colored dye? Eureka! I just invented permanent, mostly non-fading, clothing dyes!” The rest is just messing with chemicals they wouldn’t understand for decades, with respect to why the F it even worked – same with bloody transistors. It was all purely, “What if we used X to grow a crystal instead, would it work better?”, with probably thousands of random failures, none of which worked, because they had no flipping clue why the first one did either.
Ray Ceeya @7: I somehow missed your comment until now. From what I’ve read, the point-contact transistor was invented by Bardeen and Brattain. The bipolar junction transistor (BJT) was invented by Shockley (1948 patent here).
If you really did want to throw some shade on Shockley’s scientific credentials you might argue that his work on charge transport in semiconductors was heavily dependent on the work of Léon Brillouin whose book, Wave Propagation in Period Sctructures, was published in 1946, and a copy of which is in my hand as I type this. Brillouin is also known to have visited Bell Labs in the late 1940s, presumably at Shockley’s invitation. So IMHO the worst you can say is that Shockley took a relatively new piece of mathematical theory and applied it to his particular field of research. I think this is how science is supposed to work.
@7 Wave Propagation in Periodic Structures. Dammit, I should not try to type one-handed!
@ ^ cafebabe : Your typing is still better than mine usually is..
Maybe so but the “science” of eugenics doesn’t work and the worst is how racist and awful a human being Shockley was. If you read the linked article in the OP you’d already know :
Source : https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adf8117
So, yeah, whatever valid science work he did was pretty much offset by his being a racist reichwing douche.
StevoR, I think you’ve totally missed the point cafebabe was making.
Basically, that the denigration of his scientific achievements in his own field is a separate thing from the denigration of his pseudoscientific achievements in other fields, and holds less merit.
I concur, FWTW.
@28. PS. There is that annoying only 3 free articles permonth limit so Iguess its possuible you & others can’t actually see what the Science editorial here says.. FWIW. Were you able to read it cafebabe?
@29. John Morales : Maybe you and cafebabe are the ones’ missing the point & broader context here?
StevoR, nope. No maybe.
Bad retort, too; even were it not the case that we do actually get “the point & broader context”, it would be irrelevant to whether you missed cafebabe’s point.
So. Again:
What you quoted was explicitly about “his particular field of research.”
Your response was about the ““science” of eugenics”.
“The Elon Musk abuse”
oh, won’t someone pity the poor Elon?
@ 31 John Morales
Morales, read for comprehension: StevoR wrote:
Whether you agree or not (and of course you don’t on principle) “valid science work” is clearly acknowledged. StevoR is saying it was “offset” (i.e. doesn’t excuse) more harmful behaviour.
(Incidentally, I assume the “denigration” of Shockley’s work you refer to is the two rather mild comments at 7 & 8 that are all I can see before cafebabe’s comment?)
Silentbob:
Yes, I know he wrote that.
Point is, that was not a rebuttal to (nor even addressing!) cafebabe’s point.
Since I know StevoR is a sincere commenter, I infer that he missed the point, rather than deliberately avoiding it.
The actual quotation: “whatever valid science work he did”.
Rather non-committal, there. The only acknowledgement is that it may exist, not that it does.
(In passing, the very concept of “offsets” is problematic; cf. De Sade)
Nope.
Basically, the point is that to claim Shockley lacked scientific merit at his vocation is not really merited, and that this is independent to the lack of scientific merit of his avocation.
@31. John Morales : Nomaybe that youare missing thepoint? yeah, Ikinda agree but not inthewya you type here.
Point is its NOT juist about Shockley’s science.
Sigh. That didn’t look like that when I typed it. Clarifying fix :
No “maybe” that you are missing the (broader) point? Yeah, I kinda agree but not in the way you type it here.
Becuase the point isn’t this is NOT about Shockley’s science but rtaher about his racism.
Oh FFS. Fix :
Because the point is that this is NOT about Shockley’s science but rather about his racism. That’s the broader point and conetext her e& his science is mostly irrelevant to that. Saved that Shockley used his science work to wrongly give credit to his racist views.
So wish we could edit here.
Hope y’all get the gist.
Communication, how does it work again?
StevoR, it’s alright. Your typographic idiosyncrasies don’t faze me.
Anyway, pointless belabouring that you were critiquing #26, not the OP.
StevoR @30:
So the earlier comments specifically about his science (i.e downplaying his contributions to transistor development) were somehow not missing the point & broader context? Cafebabe’s comments were a response to those, but it’s only then you noticed something wrong?