Alan Turing: Gay Hero

From the day he was born — 23 June 1912 — Alan Mathison Turing seemed destined to solitude, misunderstanding and persecution…

This month Nature is doing a special collection of articles and essays on Alan Turing, one of my personal heroes.

For those who don't know Alan Turing, he was one of the pioneers of computer science and artificial intelligence as well as a brilliant scientist and mathematician. A genius at codebreaking and cryptography, he was the man who figured out how to crack the German's Enigma machine during World War II, a breakthrough that many say ended the war two years early. Churchill himself said that "it was thanks to Ultra [breaking the codes] that we won the war."

Did Turing get a medal for his work to end World War II? National recognition as a hero? No. In one of the most tragic occurrences in all of scientific history, Alan Turing was prosecuted for the crime of being gay ("gross indecency" due to homosexual acts, in the terms of 1952). Rather than renounce his sexuality or go to prison, Turing allowed himself to be chemically castrated, a disgusting act of torture against a man who had done everything he could for his country.

It was two years after his prosecution and chemical castration that Alan Turing was found dead at age 41. He had committed suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide.

It makes me weep with anger to think of Alan Turing, one of the most selfless and brilliant men in science, persecuted and killed by ignorant and hateful people simply for being gay. With the recent repeal of Don't Ask/Don't Tell, it seems that it has taken us a hundred years to be able to accept gay war heroes for who they truly are.

Turing's legacy will live on, and I encourage everyone to go and peruse the articles written in Nature (some of the articles are behind a paywall):

The Man Behind the Machine gives an overview of Turing's contributions to computer science

Ghost in the Machine is a fictional story about artificial consciousness.

I am currently writing a novella about artificial intelligence that deals with the romance between an artificially created human and the doctor who helps him find emotion. I've been stuck on finding a name for the android, but I think I've got it now–Alan.