Shockley was a racist and eugenicist.

This week's issue on the 75th anniversary of the transistor describes a triumph of both basic and applied science. What started out as studies on the fundamental physics of silicon led to the device that makes it possible to read this article online. The coinventor of the transistor, William Shockley, who along with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain won the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics, is correctly recognized as a primary architect of the computer age. Gordon Moore (cofounder of Intel Corporation) famously said that Shockley put the silicon in "Silicon Valley." Appallingly, Shockley devoted the latter part of his life to promoting racist views, arguing that higher IQs among Blacks were correlated with higher extents of Caucasian ancestry, and advocating for voluntary sterilization of Black women. At the time, Science did not condemn Shockley for what he was: a charlatan who used his scientific credentials to advance racist ideology.