BRIGHT MINDS, DARK THOUGHTS
A new biography recounts how Silicon Valley rose in part from one scientist's bitter descent.

Shockley believed in natural hierarchies of talent. There were those at the top, like himself, and there were the ordinary masses, like his colleagues at Bell Labs in the 1940s, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. According to Shurkin, it was Bardeen and Brattain who did the key work in creating the first transistor. Only by a nimble manipulation of office politics did Shockley manage to take over the press conference announcing their new product and take credit himself. Aghast at the success of his supposedly simpleminded colleagues and afraid of the competition, Shockley persuaded senior management to assign Brattain and Bardeen to months of brainstorming with patent lawyers, keeping them from the lab. When they tried to return, he threatened to cut their budget or declare them cheaters if they attempted research similar to his own.

Shockley's true moment of innovation—inspired by jealousy—came in 1951, when he devised the crucial next stage in microelectronics, the junction transistor. Soon, however, it became clear even to him that his pure research abilities were tapped out, and he moved to the quiet apricot groves south of San Francisco to launch a transistor business. The Shockley Semiconductor Company became a magnet for top engineers eager to work with the legendary inventor. When Shockley yelled like a spoiled child and proved incapable of bringing quality products to market, many of these bright minds—including Intel founder Gordon Moore—abandoned their supposed guru. Instead, they started their own industrial revolution next door. Shockley's company became a centrifuge, pulling in talent and then distributing it efficiently nearby in what is now Silicon Valley. Once again Shockley had failed where lesser minds (by his measure) prevailed brilliantly, earning millions.

When his company tanked in the 1960s, Shockley left electronics altogether, became a professor at nearby Stanford University, and in the view of many, went off the deep end. His fascination with largely outdated genetics research (epitomized by his famed association with a Nobel laureate sperm bank) transformed his elitist worldview into full-blown racism. In the last years of his life he was utterly isolated from his former colleagues, left to harangue strangers on the inadequacy of the Negro race.

With unprecedented access to the private Shockley archives at Stanford, Shurkin fills out this portrait of a flawed giant with pathos drawn from Shockley's letters, revealing a man crushed under the weight of his own pathological insecurities. -Susan Kruglinski

BOOK
All things crawly and beautiful

The Animal Series from Reaktion Books ($19.95 each) is an eclectically illustrated romp through both the biology and the meaning of creatures, from cockroaches to salmon. Running 200 pages or so apiece, these books make the world of organisms seem as fascinating as it did when you first learned to distinguish a quack from a moo. Think of the Animal Series as storybooks for grown-ups.

Thirteen books have been published so far (six more are due out by the end of the year), each one revealing a wealth of artistic, scientific, and cultural detail about its subject. In Bee, you learn that the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus "asked to be buried in honey at his death, probably because as the first practical anatomist he knew that it is an excellent preservative for organic specimens." More recently, NASA space-shuttle research has found that bees assemble perfect hives even in the absence of gravity. According to Parrot, "budgie smugglers" is Australian slang for tight men's swimming briefs, and Snake reveals that Malayan pit viper venom is being studied as a treatment for stroke.

The series is beautifully designed and smartly written. (The author of Whale is a conservation biologist; the author of Falcon is a research fellow at the University of Cambridge as well as a falconer.) These books pull together disparate facts and interpretations into satisfying narratives that really know a crow. If only there were one called Human.   -Jessica Ruvinsky

BOOK
Sour truths about modern food

Confectioners once lured children to the candy store with brilliant red, green, and yellow sweets dyed with toxic mercuric sulfide, copper arsenite, and yellow lead chromate. These 19th-century additives caused anemia and bone disease, but as British biophysicist Walter Gratzer demonstrates, the modern food supply may not be much safer. Milk from industrial dairy farms contains traces of some 50 antibiotics and hormones, not to mention blood and pus from infected cow udders and hooves. Even organic fruits and vegetables are suspect, often bearing residues of the toxic pesticide copper sulfate.

In Terrors of the Table: The Curious History of Nutrition (Oxford University Press, $30), Gratzer chronicles the checkered record of nutritional research, showing just how often we have been led astray.  The Roman-era physician Galen advised his readers to avoid fruit entirely and so contributed to 1,500 years of malnutrition. In the 1970s, Japanese food researchers invented high-fructose corn syrup, a cheap soft-drink sweetener that Gratzer calls "an unmitigated catastrophe." Six times sweeter than glucose, it wreaks havoc with metabolism and has been linked to rising rates of obesity and diabetes.

A few heroes appear along the way, like the nutritionists whose detective work led to the discovery that vitamin deficiencies cause serious disease. And Gratzer leavens his historical narrative with intriguing anecdotes. Who knew that the word grog came from the nickname of the first British admiral to issue his men a scurvy-averting ration of rum, water, and lemon juice? Or that the French once treated constipation by swallowing large tablets of toxic antimony—and then recovered the excreted metal pills for future use? But these tales pale beside his indictment of modern food production and its noxious brew of trans fats, fillers, emulsifiers, colorings, and chemical flavorings. -Heather Pringle

MUSEUM
Where Geophysics Sings

To the 285 residents of Kaktovik, a remote Eskimo village in Alaska, the unwieldy name of Naalagiagvik translates as "the place where you go to listen." It refers to a quiet stretch of snow named by the Inupiat people who live nearby. Sleepy white on the surface, the location is alive with geologic and celestial activity, including tremors, northern lights, and magnetic disturbances—a silent but pervasive bustle.

Naalagiagvik is the inspiration for The Place Where You Go to Listen, a new environmental installation by experimental composer John Luther Adams at the University of Alaska Museum of the North in Fairbanks. In a small white room pocked with 14 high-fidelity speakers, real-time local geologic, astronomical, and meteorologic data are fed into a computer that translates the information, using filters of Adams's creation, into sound and light. Magnetic flutters in the atmosphere, caused by the same storms that create nighttime auroras, manifest as a shimmering synthesized carillon. When the deep earth rumbles, drums ascend at a frequency that is almost too low to hear but can be felt in the gut. -Amy Mayer