IN THIS CORNER
I'D LIKE A NOBEL PRIZE, YES, BUT I HAVE THIS ONE QUESTION

Author: By Robert Taylor Globe Staff

Date: Friday, March 7, 1980
Page: ?????
Section: RUN OF PAPER

As you are probably aware, five Nobel laureates have volunteered for duty already. Four have swaddled themselves in the protective toga of anonymity; the fifth is William Shockley, proponent of the notion that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. The prospect of a future with a generation of Shockleys in it might make an ad for Alka Seltzer, but it does nothing for me. With all deference to the American hockey team, they were my third greatest Olympic thrill, preceded by Jesse Owens, snubbed by Hitler, Berlin 1936, and the first minute of the second Louis-Schmeling fight, which you will tell me was a professional fandango rather than a knightly quest undertaken in the Olympic spirit of selflessness.

Dr. Shockley and Dr. Graham are soulmates who sound as if they had been
invented by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. "The electric light bulb has been more useful to me than any poem I can think of," says utili-tarian Dr. Graham. He has evidently never heard of or chooses to ignore the famous exchange between Bernard Shaw and Ellen Terry when she proposed a eugenic match. "Suppose," said Shaw, "he was born with my body and your brains?" What if the child is mild-mannered Clark Kent with the genetic views of Genghis Khan? Well, Edison didn't get the electric-light on his first try, either.

A Nobel candidate, once Dr. Graham has his way, will require the stamina of a standing bull. The mothers, of course, must have impeccable credentials as members of Mensa, an organization whose members have an IQ above 98 percent of the populace. Despite a surplus of universal genius, I flunked my Mensa. Indeed the only Mensa I know is Martin Slobodkin, the effervescent epicurean who has long since retired the trophy for party-going. Though he's president- emeritus of the L-Street Brownies and the American Recorder Society, he's probably not the role-model Messrs. Shockley and Graham envision. He swims in the North Atlantic in February, and regards the world through a monocle and there is a rumor about that links him with the liaison of Bernard Shaw and Ellen Terry.

Anyway, three Mensae have accepted Graham's groundrules. No doubt they have hidden the anthologies of poetry and other seditious texts spreading eugenic impurity, and are now awaiting impatiently, like someone on hold listening to piped-in telephone music. Will the child qualify as a grade-one thinker? That is what William Golding, in his fine essay, "Thinking as a Hobby,"calls the bigtime reasoners. When Golding was an Oxford undergraduate he encountered Albert Einstein, who did not at that time speak English. Einstein was leaning on the parapet of a small bridge. Golding stood beside him, an aspirant to enlightenment. Finally Einstein pointed at a trout wavering in midstream, and said, "Fisch."

Overcome by awe, Golding instantly responded. "Fisch. Ja Ja."

They stood side by side for perhaps another five minutes. "Then Professor Einstein, his whole figure still conveying goodwill and amiability, drifted away out of sight."

Aside from the goodwill and amiability, the elemental characteristic distinguishing Einstein from scientists like Graham and Shockley is that Einstein would squander ten minutes of brain time gazing at a Fisch.

That, of course, doesn't allay my apprehensions about the Nobel Prize, a scenario of the future in which laureates are advertised like stallions in "The Blood Horse". A few fractious women may not appreciate the benefits thus conferred upon them, preferring, say, John Travolta to a eugenically- sound patriarch. They don't belong in Shockley's brave new world; women who fancy a pretty face need not apply.

MULVOY;03/06,19:45 GALLAG;03/07,10 B08035161