Update 11 September 2009: The UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has today released a apologising for Alan Turing鈥檚 treatment.
SEVENTY years ago, a 27-year-old mathematician called Alan Turing arrived at Bletchley Park, 86 kilometres north of London and headquarters of the British operation, to help break the Nazis鈥� secret codes.
During his studies at the University of Cambridge and at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, Turing had laid the foundations for computer science by imagining a machine that would be capable of any form of computation.
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At Bletchley, however, he was instrumental in breaking the Enigma code, among others, and helping to shorten the second world war. After the war, he worked on artificial intelligence and created the Turing test, designed to show if a machine can think in any meaningful way.
But being homosexual, Turing fell victim to a toxic combination of prejudice and science. In 1952, after being convicted of gross indecency, he was given the choice of prison or oestrogen injections to 鈥渃ure鈥� his homosexuality. He chose the latter, lost his security clearance, and in 1954 committed suicide, biting into an apple dipped in potassium cyanide.
鈥淏eing homosexual, Turing fell victim to a toxic combination of prejudice and science鈥�
The UK has started to honour this great man. There are statues, a plaque on his childhood home, a building or two and a road named after him. The centenary of his birth, 2012, will be celebrated as Year. At the same time, the UK government refuses to fund the Bletchley Park Trust 鈥� a museum devoted to the wartime code breakers. In contrast, the US Association for Computing Machinery has been presenting the Turing Award, the computer science Nobel, since 1966.
To try to right these wrongs, I have set up a petition on the website of calling for an apology for the mistreatment of Turing. More than 25,000 people have signed it, and it has been backed by many scientists, including Richard Dawkins.
It is a disgrace that Alan Turing was prosecuted, and that his name is only well known to computer scientists and cryptographers. An apology would help recalibrate our collective moral compass by saying that his prosecution and treatment were wrong.