I was recently listening to the final chapter of The Secret War
by Max Hastings and even now. Years.
After first learning the history, the story of Alan
Turing leaves me completely choked up.
Alan Turing, a man who helped defeat the Nazis, was chemically
castrated by the very government he helped save.
I asked Notebook LM to tell you the story because I don't think
I can't. It is arguably one of the
cruelest ironies in the history of the modern world.
Imagine a man who saves millions of lives.
And I don't mean that metaphorically.
I mean a man who actually shortens the deadliest war in
human history by two years. Yeah, keeping entire cities from
being bombed and keeping soldiers out of the trenches.
You expect statues for that, right?
Right. Parades A knighthood at the very
least. Absolutely.
But instead, the government he saved turns around, breaks into
his home, strips him of his dignity and forces him to
undergo this barbaric medical procedure that fundamentally
destroys who he is. It sounds like some kind of
dystopian fiction, but this is the very real history of Alan
Turing. Today we are doing a deep dive
into the source material on Turing.
You've got his Wikipedia biography and a really moving
reflection text on his treatment.
And our mission today is to unpack the hidden history of a
queer icon. Right, because we aren't just
talking about the tech today. No, we're talking about a man
whose identity was criminalized by the very democracy he
protected. And especially for you
listening, if you're part of the queer community and maybe
haven't heard the full background of Alan Turing, this
is going to be a heavy one. But it is so necessary.
It is. Most people know the name.
Maybe, you know, he cracked the Enigma code.
But to understand why his death was such a tragedy, we have to
look at his life, his first love, the crushing pressure of
his war work and the philosophy that actually drove him.
And the big what if that haunts this entire story.
If he hadn't been persecuted, what else would he have solved?
That is the question we should all be asking by the end of
this. So let's rewind Before he was a
war hero, before he was branded a criminal, he was just a kid,
and apparently a very smart one. Oh, incredibly smart.
Even his primary school headmistress spotted it right
away. The biography quotes her telling
his parents. I have had clever boys and
hardworking boys. But Alan is a genius.
Wow. But you have to picture the
setting here. This is the 1920s British public
school system. Very rigid.
Exactly. Rigid, obsessed with sports and
classics. And here comes Alan, who is
eccentric, messy and totally obsessed with science.
He really didn't fit in. So he was the classic outcast
genius. Until he wasn't.
At Sherborn School, he met Christopher Morecam.
And this is a pivotal moment. This isn't just a study, buddy.
From what the text said, no. Not at all.
This is the emotional core of Turing's entire life.
Christopher was a year older. Small, slight, but
intellectually he was Allen's absolute equal.
So for the first time, Allen wasn't alone.
Right, they shared everything. Astronomy, math, codes.
They would pass these notes in class, deciphering ciphers.
It was this intense romantic friendship.
Christopher was Alan's first love.
I can imagine how huge that is for a kid who feels like an
alien finally finding your person.
It was everything. Alan absolutely worshipped him.
But there's a tragedy built into this right from the start,
because Christopher had bovine tuberculosis.
Which back then was. A ticking clock.
Yeah, In 1930, Christopher died suddenly.
He was only a teenager and Alan was just completely shattered.
How does a teenage boy even process that kind of grief,
especially when he probably couldn't express the romantic
nature of it to anyone around him?
He processed it through his intellect and this is where the
reflection text gets really fascinating.
He write these letters to Christopher's mother that are
heartbreaking, he told her. I know I must put as much
energy, if not as much interest into my work as if he were
alive, because that is what he would like me to do.
He's taking on the burden of two lives.
He is. But it goes deeper than that.
In his grief, Alan became obsessed with the question of
the spirit. He wanted to know, if the body
dies, does the mind survive? Can a mind exist without a
biological body? Wait.
Are you saying what I think you're saying?
I am the seeds of artificial intelligence.
The very idea that thinking can be separated from flesh likely
came from a teenage boy trying to figure out if his dead first
love was still out there somewhere.
That completely reframes the cold, logical computer for me.
It's born out of love and loss. It's basically a mechanism for
grief. He creates this concept that the
mind is just software, and if you can replicate the software,
maybe the person isn't totally gone.
So, keeping that in mind, he goes to Cambridge, then
Princeton, and in 1936 he publishes this groundbreaking
paper on computable numbers. This is the big one.
Help us out here. Why is a paper on numbers so
critical? Because before this paper, the
word computer actually meant a person, usually a woman sitting
at a desk doing math. Machines in 1936 were single
purpose. A toaster toasts, a calculator
adds. They were hardwired.
Right. You couldn't tell a toaster to
suddenly become a radio. Exactly.
But Turing imagined what he called a universal machine, a
machine that could do anything if you just gave it the right
instructions. He realized you could separate
the hardware from the logic. He invented software.
He invented the fundamental architecture of the digital age.
The phone you were listening to this on the laptop.
They are all Turing machines. He conceptualized this back in
1936. So he's mapped out the future of
technology, but the president is about to catch up with him real
fast. It's 1939 and war breaks out.
And the eccentricity that made him an outcast at school made
him an absolute legend at Bletchley Park.
Bletchley is the secret code breaking center and Turing shows
up and they immediately start calling him the Prof.
The Prof He was such a character he was terrified of his hay
fever, so he would cycle to the office wearing a full military
gas mask. That is a terrifying image for
the locals. Just a guy in a tweed suit and a
gas mask pedaling through the English countryside.
And inside the Hut, he chained his favorite mug to the radiator
because he was paranoid someone would steal it.
But beneath all those quirks, he was facing an impossible math
problem. The German Enigma.
Let's breakdown in the Enigma. People know it was a hard code,
but why was it considered entirely unbreakable?
Because it wasn't static, it was a machine with rotors.
Every time you pressed a key, the rotor spun, changing the
electrical circuit entirely. So if you pressed A three times,
it might come out as G, then P, then X.
So you can't just look for patterns and say a = g.
No, and the Germans changed the starting rotor settings every
single day at midnight. There was something like 159
quintillion possible settings. I mean, tell him it's a number
so big it's meaningless to the human brain.
If you had 10,000 people checking one setting a minute,
it would take longer than the age of the universe to check
them all, and they only had 24 hours before it changed again.
So it's humanly impossible. Which is why Turing said it's
not a human problem, it's a machine problem.
He needed a machine to beat the machine.
Enter the bomb. The Bomb.
This massive, ticking, whirring electromechanical beast.
Now a lot of people think the bomb just found the answer, but
it didn't do that. It found the lies.
What? Do you mean by?
That it used logic. Turing knew the Germans were
rigid with their protocols. They would sign off messages
with Heil Hitler or send a weather report at the exact same
time every morning. Because we had a crib like a
CHEAT SHEET. Right, so he could tell his
machine assume these encrypted letters mean weather report.
The bomb would then race through the wheel settings looking for
electrical contradictions. If the circuit implied that the
letter A was connected to A, that's physically impossible in
an Enigma machine. The bomb would know this setting
is a lie and instantly Click to the next one.
It wasn't searching for the needle in the haystack, it was
blowing away the hay. Perfectly put.
It mechanically discarded the billions of wrong answers until
only a few plausible ones were left for the human code Breakers
to check. And this worked, but it wasn't
fast enough initially, was it? The bio mentions this amazing
story about a letter to Churchill.
This really shows Turing's backbone.
The military brass didn't get what he was doing.
They were underfunding Bletchley.
So Turing and his team broke the chain of command.
They wrote a letter directly to Prime Minister Winston Churchill
saying we can win this war, but we need resources now.
That's incredibly risky. That's court martial territory
it. Is But Churchill read it and he
instantly recognized the urgency.
He slapped a red sticker on it that said action this this day.
Action this day. It meant give them everything
they want right now, no arguments.
That decision changed the course of the war.
They focused on the naval Enigma EU boats that were starving
Britain once Turing cracked that the supply convoys could get
through the Atlantic. Historians estimate this
shortened the war in Europe by more than two years.
At least two years. Think about the Holocaust, think
about the Eastern Front. Two more years of that we are
talking about 14,000,000 lives saved over. 18 million people
because of the guy with the mug chained to the radiator.
And the ultimate tragedy is when the war ended, nobody knew.
Right, because of the Official Secrets Act.
They burned the papers, they dismantled the bombs.
Turing went from being arguably the most important man in the
Allied forces to just an academic in Manchester.
He couldn't tell his mother. He couldn't tell his friends.
That level of silence must have been incredibly isolating.
He dealt with it physically. This is a part of his life.
People often forget he was an Olympic level athlete.
He actually tried out for the 1948 British Olympic team as a
marathon runner. Seriously.
A marathon runner. He came in fifth in the trials.
His time was only 11 minutes off the Olympic gold medal pace.
He would run for miles and miles.
He told a colleague that he had such a stressful job, the only
way he could get it out of his mind was by running hard.
He's literally running from the secrets, running from the
pressure. And he's also continuing his
work. In 1950, he publishes Computing
Machinery and Intelligence. This is where he proposes what
we now call the Turing Test. I feel like this test is often
misunderstood. It's usually described as Can a
computer trick a human into thinking it's real?
That's the surface level reading, but philosophically
it's much more radical. Turing was asking, does it
matter if a machine has a soul, if it acts like it's thinking,
if it holds a conversation, if it makes you laugh?
Isn't that thinking? It's the fake it till you make
it theory of consciousness. It goes right back to
Christopher Morcombe. If the mind is just behavior and
output, then the biological body doesn't actually matter.
You are what you do, not what you're made of.
Which is a beautiful idea. But in 1952, the biological
reality of who he was came crashing down on him.
This is where the story turns incredibly dark.
You have to understand the atmosphere of 1952 Britain.
It's the Cold War. Everyone is paranoid about
Soviet spies, and the government didn't just view homosexuality
as illegal, they viewed it as a severe security risk.
Following the defection of some gay spies like Burgess and
McLean, the state thought gay men were highly susceptible to
blackmail. So they were actively hunting
them. They were and Turing.
He was naive. He was radically honest.
He met a 19 year old man named Arnold Murray and they started a
relationship. And then the inciting incident
happens, the burglary. Right.
Turing's house was burgled. Arnold Murray admitted he knew
the guy who did it. So Turing, being the rigid,
honest man he was, went down to the police station to report a
crime. He's the victim in this
scenario. He is, but during the
investigation, the police naturally asked how he knew
Murray, and Turing just told them he candidly admitted to the
sexual relationship. He wrote out a full statement.
He basically thought, I'm a grown man, this is private,
what's the big deal? He vastly underestimated the
institutional hate of the time. He was immediately charged with
gross indecency under section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment
Act 1885. Which is exactly the same law
they used to convict Oscar Wilde.
The very same And because of the Official Secrets Act, Turing
couldn't stand up in court and defend his character by saying,
hey, I'm the guy who saved you all from the Nazis.
He just had to stand there and take the conviction.
And the sentence he received. This is the part of the source
material that is genuinely physically hard to read.
He pleaded guilty and was given a choice, go to prison, which
would destroy his ability to work and cut him off from his
research or take probation. But the probation came with a
brutal condition organotherapy. Which is just a clinical
euphemism for chemical castration.
Yes, he chose the therapy to avoid PRISM.
They injected him with Stilbostrol, A synthetic
estrogen. The state's goal was to kill his
libido to effectively cure him of his identity.
Think about the profound cruelty of that This is a man who spent
his entire life proving that the mind and body are separate, that
the hardware doesn't matter, it's the software.
And the government stepped in and said no, we are going to
destroy your hardware and we will use it to break your
software. And it did break him.
The physical toll was horrific. The treatment rendered him
impotent. It caused gynecomastia, the
formation of breast tissue. He gained weight.
The Olympic level runner. His body was completely
revolting against him. But the professional and
psychological toll was even worse.
Because they took his security clearance.
That was the final blow. Because of the criminal
conviction, he was officially labeled a security risk.
He was barred from GC DHQ, which was the successor to Bletchley
Park. He became a risk to the very
state he had saved. He was locked out of the world
he helped build, he wrote in a letter at the time.
No doubt I shall emerge from it all a different man, but quite
who I've not found out. Two years of this, two years of
the hormones, the public shame, the surveillance, and then we
reached June 8th, 1954. His housekeeper found him dead
in his bed. The cause of death was cyanide
poisoning. And the apple was found next to
him A. Half eaten apple on his bedside
table. Now the official inquest ruled
it a suicide and the apple is so incredibly theatrical.
Snow White was his favorite fairy tale.
Biographers speculate he was re enacting the scene where the
wicked queen poisons the apple. Right.
Dip the apple in the brew. Let the sleeping death seep
through. Exactly.
It feels like a very deliberate message, a final defiant gesture
from a man who loved codes in theatre.
But the sources do mention another theory right?
That it might have been an accident.
Yes, the gold plating theory. His mother favored this, and
some philosophers agree. Turing had a little amateur lab
set up in his spare room. He was gold plating spoons and
using potassium cyanide in that process.
He was known to be notoriously careless with chemicals, so it's
impossible he accidentally inhaled the fumes.
Does the exact mechanism really matter though?
I don't think it does. Whether it was a deliberate exit
using the Snow White apple or a reckless accident by a man who
been pushed to the absolute brink, the tragedy is exactly
the same. The world lost one of its
greatest minds at age 41 following state sanctioned
persecution. And it took a remarkably long
time for the world to even try to make it right.
Decades. For decades, his conviction
stood and his war work remained totally classified.
It wasn't until a massive public petition in 2009 that Prime
Minister Gordon Brown finally issued a public apology.
He called the treatment appalling.
And then Queen Elizabeth granted A posthumous royal pardon in
2013. Right, which eventually led to
the Alan Turing Law in 2017. That legislation retroactively
pardoned thousands of other men who had been convicted under
those same historical anti-gay laws.
And now he's the face on the £50 note in the UK.
Which is a nice recognition, sure, but it doesn't bring him
back. That brings us right back to the
what if we talked about at the start.
He was only 41 at the time of his death.
He was working on morphogenesis, figuring out how leopards get
their spots through mathematical biology.
He was expanding his thoughts on AI if he had lived another 30 or
40 years. He would have seen the personal
computer revolution. He would have seen the dawn of
the Internet. He might have solved biological
and computational problems that we are still struggling to
figure out today. It's a stark reminder that
prejudice isn't just cruel, it is deeply wasteful.
We threw away a singular mind, an atheist, a homosexual and
eccentric marathon runner who defined the modern.
World we did. And for anyone listening today,
remember that you are constantly interacting with his legacy.
The man who saved the world and the man the world ultimately
failed. Exactly.
So here's the final thought to Mull over.
When you pull out your smartphone today or boot up your
laptop, ask yourself if you're just looking at a machine or if
you were looking at the legacy of a man desperately trying to
keep the spirit of his first love live.
Thank you for joining us on this deep dive.
This is Elton Sherwin. Stay safe, be brave, and God
bless.