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.Like many specialist journalists, he had little sympathy for histechnically challenged colleagues who were slowing things down whenhe was on deadline, so after the first conference, he decided to commita little sabotage.He stationed himself to the side of the room, so thatto answer his questions the Nobelists would have face him, in profile tothe cameras which television stations hate and from the micro-phones which muffled the sound.It was more subtle than pullingtheir power cords.3This was still the height of the Cold War and mutual atomic terror, soCohn asked Shockley (in profile) what he thought the chances were of anuclear war.Shockley responded. Fifty-fifty, I think. Then he paused asecond. But if there is nuclear war man would at least have to begin tocontrol his own genetics.I think the present situation in the civilizedworld is anti-evolutionary.The people who reproduce in the largestnumbers may be far from the most competent.The more competentpeople practice birth control and have smaller families.If there were anuclear war, there would be so much genetic damage that man wouldthen be forced to plan populations yes, control breeding, that s what itwould amount to.If we began sensible population measures now, itwould make nuclear war less likely. 34 192 THREE GENERATIONS OF IMBECILES ARE ENOUGHCohn thought that an interesting response and used the quote in hisstory.Shockley, who liked a Manhattan or two, admitted later that hehad had a few drinks on the plane, which may have had something to dowith the somewhat indiscreet answer.* He claimed he had never thoughtof the question that way before, but was himself struck by what he said.He was afraid also that Cohn or his editors would blow up the story andthe headline would say something like NOBEL LAUREATE THINKSNUCLEAR WAR WOULD BE A GOOD THING.Cohn, a superbreporter, played it straight, as did his editors.4**The next February, he followed his thoughts more fully at aninvited speech before the Planned Parenthood League of AlamedaCounty (the Berkeley Oakland vicinity).Shockley warned that if exponential growth of world population continued unchecked, itwould lead to starvation.On the other hand, he said, if populationgrowth is controlled, there is a danger of making life so good thathumanity could suffer evolution in reverse.Darwin had described ascenario in which the fittest survive; Shockley was concerned about aworld in which not only do the unfit survive, they are fruitful andmultiply stupidly. Those very things which are now giving us our highest standard ofliving may have an anti-evolutionary effect, he said. In all past peri-ods of civilization, danger of starvation and death from other violentcauses existed.Today our high standard of living may result simply in apredominance of the people who can produce the most offspring.Ifthis criterion alone is selected for determining the future characteris-tics of the species, it is extremely likely that this would have a veryadverse effect.Those of us who care about this future should urgethat the problem be given one of the highest priorities for scientificstudy by our ablest scholars, he concluded.35Shockley was also invited to be a speaker at the first of the NobelConferences after the dedication at Gustavus two years later, in January1965.This time the town was in the depth of the Minnesota winter, withtemperatures below zero and all the lovely Victorian houses the ivy* There is no reason to believe drinking was an issue.** Shockley said the idea popped into his head when Cohn asked the question.Embar-rassed at being the instigator of what followed, Cohn, who ended an illustriouscareer at the Washington Post, asked him not to tell anyone. THREE GENERATIONS OF IMBECILES ARE ENOUGH 193and brick mansions, the frame homes and all the trees huddled stoi-cally against the gelid prairie blasts.The theme of the conference was Genetics and the Future of Man. Shockley was one of three Nobelistsasked to speak: the other two were Polykarp Kusch, a winner in 1955 forhis work on measuring atoms, and Edward Tatum, a biochemist whowon the 1958 Nobel for his work using bread mold to show how genesregulate chemical events.Another speaker was the ethicist PaulRamsay.Why Kusch and Shockley, physicists both, were invited to agenetic conference remains a mystery, although Kusch was on the com-mittee that organized the conference and may have thought he hadsomething to say.Eight thousand people showed up for the conference,held mostly on the second floor of Alumni Hall, in a large rectangularballroom.Shockley would call the meeting the turning point of my life. 36Indeed it was.He described himself as a non-specialist 37 concerned about the qual-ity of human life.His concern, he said, came from personal experiencesand admitted these personal experiences do not qualify me as an expertin the fields of genetics and sociology, and my credentials are not ofcomparable standards with other speakers of this symposium.His concern for the future began during his wartime tour in India, hesaid.With eloquence that would be sorely missing from later speeches rhetorically it was probably the best speech of his life he told theGustavus audience of the crowding and the sheer mass of humanity hesaw.He described the villages on the Bengali plain how clean theywere because the Indian villagers scavenged anything that would nor-mally be litter or garbage in a western city for its utility.They evenretrieved animal droppings to be dried and used as fuel.When he returned to the States he read a booklet on the populationexplosion and the dangers of starvation, he said.He learned that ittakes seven calories of grain to feed an animal to produce one calorie offood for a human.That works well in the US, where half the caloriescome from plants and half from animals, and where there is plenty ofboth to go around
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