Alan Turing: The Enigma (114 page)

^*
Once John Turing had asked his father what he hated most. ‘Humbug’, he replied without a moment’s hesitation.

^*
Thus an exposition of this idea appeared in the 1931 American novel
Strange Brother,
⁹
one of the few accessible pre-war exceptions to the general silence: ‘You see the generative gland is made up, not only of the gland of reproduction, but of a gland which manufactures the chemicals that cause a man to be masculine in temperament, and a woman feminine.’

‘Both these chemicals are found in every human embryo. But if normal development does not take place, the feminine chemical may predominate in a male, or the masculine in a female. And we then get a man attracted by men, or a woman attracted by women.’

‘This, at least, is the most plausible theory that modern science has to offer. And our experiments on rats and guinea pigs bear out the theory We’ve proved that, aside from the function of reproduction, sex differences are chemical.’

^†
Some of the results did not fit in, because the ‘normals’ sometimes had low ratios, and the gay men high ratios. But this was ingeniously explained: ‘Those few normal subjects may be latent homosexuals, whereas the homosexuals with the high ratios may not be of the true constitutional type.’

^‡
In similar vein: ‘The growing importance of the sociological aspects of the subject makes urgent the continued investigation of the problem from a broad psychosomatic perspective.’

^*
Thus Golla and Grey Walter were the two scientific colleagues thanked by W. Ross Ashby for reading the draft of his 1952 cybernetic book Design for a Brain.

^*
The fact that he retained his OBE was itself an interesting detail of the case. The War Office would demand the return of medals from anyone guilty under the 1885 Act. The Foreign Office presumably, took a different view

^*
At the Nuffield Foundation conference that Alan attended, P.B. Medawar had proposed a programme of experiments on male animals, injecting oestrogen in order to reveal the neuro-physiological mechanism through the consequent alteration in behaviour patterns. Rarely can a Fellow of the Royal Society have had the honour of sitting at the wrong end of such an experiment.

^†
The work he was doing was on the application of sequential analysis to economics. Although he knew that Alan was interested in Bayesian statistics, he had no idea that Alan had independently invented sequential analysis in Hut 8.

^‡
In a reform typical of the period, 1952 saw a change in American immigration policy from a
legal
definition of homosexuality (the breaking of a law), to a
medical
definition. The Immigration and Nationality Act of that year specified that ‘Aliens afflicted with psychopathic personality … shall be excludable from admission into the United States.’ In 1967 the Supreme Court confirmed that ‘the legislative history of the Act indicates beyond a shadow of doubt that the Congress intended the phrase “psychopathic personality” to include homosexuals.’ Strictly speaking, therefore, Alan Turing entered the prohibited category in 1952 irrespective of the trial; in practice, of course, the point was that he had been found out.

^*
It may be that to avoid being sent to prison he had to give a promise that he would not repeat the ‘offence’, in addition to undertaking the hormone treatment. Lack of evidence prevents this point being settled. If he had so promised, he would have kept to it, but he would have been the first to observe that this said nothing about what he did abroad. For this reason his foreign holidays may have been all the more consciously a critical factor in his life after 1952.

^*
Jung held that dreams had meanings, but did not believe that they could be deciphered according to some fixed scheme:
²⁸
‘The interpretation of dreams and symbols demands intelligence. It cannot be turned into a mechanical system. … It demands … an increasing knowledge of the dreamer’s individuality…’

^*
He did agree with Robin that one should not persist with efforts to gain the interest of a boy of less than fifteen or so. (Robin had attracted a good deal of attention as a boy, and a too enthusiastic admirer had had the effect of putting him off sex for a time.)

^†
Even so, it was more easily legible than the message he once sent to David Champernowne which simply consisted of a piece of teleprinter tape. It had his friend spending hours on breaking the Baudot code.

^*
E.B. Strauss, the Jungian psychoanalyst, whom Robin had known for a long time,

^†
A reference to an incident in Robin’s boyhood, when the exiled Emperor of Abyssinia had resided near his home, and had invited Robin and his mother to tea.

^‡
There was a postscript to his letter to Robin: ‘Is the beginning of this letter whimsical or what?’ – a question he did not answer. Nor did Robin look for an answer: his own reply responded subtly to the news of a ‘crisis’ by recommending the novels of Denton Welch.

^*
Robin’s interests were more uniformly distributed.

^†
To be seeing a psychoanalyst, foreign and Jewish at that, was of course another source of stigma and certainly a drastic departure from his early background. It was typical of him that he should write in this open, nonchalant way. Nor was Lyn Newman a privileged
confidante
in the respect; thus Alan had also made friends with Michael Polanyi’s young son John, recognising in him a budding chemist, inviting him to dinner to talk about morphogenesis, and presenting him with an envelope labelled ‘scrapings from Alan Turing’s kitchen’. It contained samples from a mysterious growth on the wall which he optimistically imagined that John Polanyi could identify. While away in Canada, John had a letter from Alan
³²
‘full of hope for the future and praise for his analyst’.

^*
At Whitsun (24 May) he was due at Guildford, and on 30 May at Cambridge for Robin’s PhD oral examination, so his holiday was most likely in early June.

^*
He had recently abandoned his motor-assisted bicycle and was using a borrowed one – a ladies’ bicycle, as it happened, for it made no difference to him.

^*
His estate amounted to
^£
4603 5s 4d. But a larger sum, £6742 4s 11d, was payable by Manchester University – it was the amount due as a death grant under the terms of the superannuation policy to which he had subscribed. The verdict of suicide did not affect the payment, which, as John Turing ensured, went entirely to Mrs Turing.

^*
Almost certainly the volume of plates from the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel’s report on the
Radiolaria
, part of the immense series published by the British government in the 1880s with the scientific results of the voyage of the HMS Challenger from 1873 to 1876.

^*
It was entitled
Solvable and Unsolvable Problems
, and first gave an example of a ‘solvable’ problem. This was a solitaire game (actually the ‘fifteen puzzle’) in which, as he described, there were only a finite number of possibilities to consider (namely 16! = 20,922,789,888,000). Hence, in principle, the game could be ‘solved’ simply by listing all the possible positions. This helped to illustrate the nature of an absolutely ‘unsolvable’ problem, such as he went on to describe, but the large number also demonstrated the gap between theoretical and practical ‘solvability’. As it happened, of course, the Bombe had indeed exploited the finiteness of the Enigma by just such a brute force method, but in general the knowledge that a number is ‘only’ finite is not of practical significance. One cannot play chess, nor deduce all the wirings of an Enigma machine, by knowing that the possibilities are finite. The ‘fifteen puzzle’, indeed, poses a tough problem to the computer programmer. Turing machines, when embodied in the physical world, are severely limited by considerations other than those of logic.

^*
While some physical quantities (such as temperature) may be described by one number, in general they will require a set of numbers; anything like a direction in space, for instance, will do so. It is usual to ‘index’ this set by a letter of the alphabet. From a modern point of view the structure of the set is a reflection of the group of symmetries associated with the physical entity, and it is common to use a different type of letter (e.g. lower-case, upper-case, Greek) when different symmetry groups are implied. The word ‘fount’ made this principle explicit.

^*
Of course the equation also ran the other way: a suggestion of homosexuality could discredit the political target. In particular, it was implicit in the charge of being ‘soft on communism’.

^†
The flavour of the new policy in operation was conveyed by a report in the
New York Times
, 2 March 1954, on progress made in the previous year: ‘… the State Department, a principal target of Senator McCarthy, had separated 117 employees as “security risks”, of whom forty-three had allegations of a subversive association in their files and forty-nine had been listed as having in their files “information indicating sex perversion”. In the big super-secret Central Intelligence Agency … there were forty-eight “security risk” separations, of whom thirty-one were included with information indicating perversion …’

^*
Positive vetting was now applied to those ‘privy to the whole of an important section’ of ‘a vital secret process, equipment, policy, or broad strategic plan…’ a description which would cover anything significant done by GCHQ.

^†
There might have been more. He was, in particular, the ‘Deputy Director’ of the laboratory where the atomic bomb calculations were in progress, and might well have been consulted at an early stage about this use of the computer. Ferranti Ltd were also engaged upon guided missile development. Yet these were almost common knowledge, in comparison with the subject which was to remain unmentionable for another twenty years.

^*
Occasionally it was noted that gay men said they actually enjoyed their ‘condition’, had no desire to change, scorned the idea of psychiatry, or simply asked to be left alone. But these remarks were interpreted by the old guard as evidence of the arrogance and anti-social attitudes that made homosexuals so dangerous – and by the modernists as unfortunate hindrances to successful treatment.

^†
Lord Jowett, Lord Chancellor in the Labour Government of 1945–51, was another speaker. But his ideas had been developed more fully in a lecture
⁵³
of late 1953, where he expressed the hope that ‘treatment by hormones or glandular secretion … will help these unhappy people to eradicate their abnormal desires.’ More generally, suggestions emanating from the small back room were more robust than those of the parliamentary debate. In April 1954, the doctors’ journal The Practitioner was devoted to an analysis of the national sexual crisis. Its editorial, besides explaining that discipline must come before happiness, and that sexual vice meant ‘slow death to the race’, endorsed the suggestion made by one contributor that homosexuals should ‘strengthen their resolve’ in some ‘natural and bracing environment’–such as a ‘camp’ on the island of St Kilda. A contributing endocrinologist also drew upon German data on ‘the problem of homosexuality’, citing ‘the use of castration in over 100 cases of sexual perversion and homosexuality reported by Sand and Okkels (1938) who noted gratifying results in all but one case’.
54
For medicine as for mathematics, the world could be a single country.

^*
The British newspapers were not notable for their explanations of what was going on, but a less inhibited suggestion appeared in the Sydney Sunday Telegraph of 25 October 1953:56

The plan originated under strong United States advice to Britain to weed out homosexuals – as hopeless security risks – from important Government jobs.

^*
Ministry of Supply

^*
But there was a last parallel in that von Neumann also moved towards the problem of biological growth, although from a different point of view. His work was likewise left incomplete; he died of cancer on 8 February 1957.

^*
James Atkins himself had left the teaching of mathematics for music. He became a professional singer in 1949, and had a first Glyndebourne season in 1953.

^*
In April and May 1954 the parliamentary debates were in terms of the idea (as the outraged Sunday Express put it) that ‘instead of the prison cell they should have the doctor’s clinic.’ But more knowledgeable observers had recognised that talk of either punishing or treating all homosexuals was quite unrealistic, and the publicity given to the Montagu trials gave them the opportunity to point out the damage done to the repute or the judicial system by a law so irregularly and partially enforced. A more practical policy was defined by the Sunday Times in March; contrasting ‘those things which must needs be legally tolerated’ from those which ‘must be condemned and rooted out’. On 8 July, the Home Secretary backed down and appointed J.F. Wolfenden, a public school headmaster from 1934 to 1950, to chair a committee on the laws relating to homosexuality and prostitution. Thus Alan Turing died just as a more central strand of British administration was reasserting itself.