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long, long time ago when I was a young staff member at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., I found myself sitting at a small office table opposite Nobel laureate physicist William Shockley. Normally, this would be an exciting moment—he was coinventor of the transistor. But it was not. It was awkward. Why? Shockley had recently been publically exposed for his racist views. He had been trying to get the Academy to publish his racist theories, and as an Academy member, he had certain rights. He was, as I recall, awaiting some official deliberations about that, and I didn’t know what to say to him. I said nothing.
Shockley is one of the scientists discussed in our cover article, “The Nobel Disease: When Intelligence Fails to Protect against Irrationality.” It focuses specifically on certain august scientists who have won the Nobel Prize but then gone on to embrace highly implausible ideas roundly rejected by most scientists because of poor evidence. Neuropsychologist Candice Basterfield of the University of Melbourne, Emory University psychology professor Scott O. Lilienfeld, Shauna M. Bowes, and Thomas H. Costello (the latter two advanced graduate students in psychology at Emory University) provide thumbnail sketches of eight such Nobel laureates: Linus Pauling, Shockley, James Watson, Brian Josephson, Nikolaas Tinbergen, Kary Mullis, Louise J. Ignarro, and Luc Mantagnier. They mention others as well. And of course, other brilliant scientists in history have fallen to the same disease, among them Alfred Russel Wallace and Percival Lowell.