Shore was born in Chicago on May 8th, 1930.
Shore’s research spanned vast areas of the periodic table but he is probably best known for his pioneering work on boron hydrides, metal carbonyl clusters, and lanthanide/transition-metal systems and their conversion to catalytically active nanoparticles. He and his co-workers developed the first rational syntheses of B4–B10 boron hydrides by a counterintuitive approach involving hydride abstraction by Lewis acids.

Together with his PhD supervisor Robert Parry, he published a seminal paper “The Crystalline Compound Ammonia–Borane, H3NBH3” (J. Am. Chem. Soc.­ 1955, 77, 6804–6705). This simple compound had been considered anomalous since the addition of borane to ammonia gave a species whose molecular weight in liquid ammonia corresponded to the formula B2H6⋅2 NH3. Shore and Parry showed that H3NBH3 could be readily prepared from lithium borohydride and ammonium chloride in diethyl ether [Eq. (1)]. Furthermore, molecular weight determinations indicated that this crystalline compound was a monomer.