Alan Turing: The Enigma (102 page)

There was joking in the laboratory about how he would manage for money if he lost his job. In this respect, Max Newman spoke strongly on his behalf, and so did Blackett. Indeed Blackett went to see the Vice-Chancellor, Sir John Stopford, Professor of Experimental Neurology and a distinguished Mancunian, armed with a quotation from the Kinsey report to sustain his case. He said that Alan’s work should be safeguarded ‘at all costs’. The Vice-Chancellor was less receptive to Kinsey’s statistics than the Admiralty had been to Blackett’s convoy calculations ten years before. ‘I will listen to any argument with care and sympathy,’ said Stopford, ‘but if anyone seeks to document it they must bring me authorities I can myself respect.’ But Alan’s position was spared, although presumably only after the most thorough of carpetings, for Stopford was no friend of ‘slackness’. Max Newman’s statement was crucially important; indeed he found himself
surprised by the autonomy he enjoyed as head of department. He said he wished Alan Turing to remain, and this sufficed.

There was also his connection with King’s to consider, but here an odd coincidence came into play. His fellowship was due to expire on 13 March 1952, so although he had been arrested a Fellow, he would no longer be one at his trial. Alan consulted with Philip Hall regarding his position, and he in turn talked with Professor Adcock. They advised him not to resign, and in fact the fellowship simply ended at its appointed time, after a total of nine years spread over the past seventeen. He had no reason to feel cut off from King’s because he had been found out; Cambridge could remain a point of security and support for him. There was another point of support in the reaction of his good neighbours the Webbs. Although upset by what had transpired, the Webbs still made him welcome in their home.

Despite so much time being taken up by these events, he did not stop work. He would have been ashamed to have let them stop him, just as he had insisted on keeping up some work on logic throughout the war. The very day after the arrest, he was in London for a meeting of the Ratio Club, talking about his theory of morphogenesis. John Pringle took up the idea as a basis for his discussion of the origin of life in the primordial chemical soup, in a lecture
⁶
later in 1952. Then again, on 29 February, the day that the local newspaper was reporting the first hearing, he was defending his work against the criticisms of the Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine, then on a visit
⁷
to the Manchester chemistry department. On the same day Alan also completed his revisions to the morphogenesis paper, and on 15 March he submitted for publication his work on the calculation of the zeta function, even though the practical attempt at doing it on the prototype Manchester computer had been so unsatisfactory. It might be that he wished to get it out of the way in case he was going to prison.

On 21 March, Alan went to Henley-on-Thames for the weekend, to attend a large Nuffield Foundation conference on biological research. He found many points of contact with the discussions,
⁸
which were influenced by the rise of cybernetics and in which the importance of the morphogenetic problem was much stressed. Donald Michie was there. He had corresponded a little with Alan about the morphogenetic ideas, having himself moved on from physiology to genetics. Alan asked him to come for a walk, and revealed that beneath the
sang froid
he showed to the more conventional world, he was in a very nervous state. He mentioned the previous appearance in the magistrates court, and the forthcoming trial, which was now only a week away. Donald said that no serious person would take a court judgment in the matter to be of importance, and that Alan would have to go through with it knowing that. But Alan might well have reflected that it was not only the law that made him an outcast, but all the official British culture, that of its administration, its newspapers, schools, churches, social life and entertainment – and that very largely its intellectuals would add
their public weight against him too, whatever Donald Michie generously said.

Attitudes were one thing. Practical prospects were another. There was the nauseating business of having authorities ransack his emotional life and pronounce upon it, and there was the actual punishment that lay in store. The circumstances of his crime, with their elements of age and class difference, were against him. Even to the kindly disposed, this might seem a case of the ‘elderly degenerate’ of
The Green Bay Tree
, rather than the romantic wantonness of the greenwood tree.

His intransigent attitude was also a challenge to the authority of the law. But on the other hand, only 174 of the 746 men prosecuted in 1951 for the crime of ‘gross indecency’ had been imprisoned, and then mostly for less than six months. He would have been in a more dangerous position had the charge been that of ‘buggery’, for the law distinguished carefully between different kinds of sexual activity. He was also a ‘first offender’, which diminished the chances of imprisonment. But beyond this, the times were changing, and a more modern attitude was coming to prevail. The backroom boys were beginning to affect not only descriptions, but prescriptions.

Writing a new Foreword to
Brave New World
in 1946, Aldous Huxley suggested that ‘The release of atomic energy marks a great revolution in human history, but not (unless we blow ourselves to bits and so put an end to history) the final and most searching revolution.’ Despite the fact that he believed atomic power would usher in ‘highly centralised totalitarian governments’, continuing the trend which the Second World War had accelerated, he stuck to his guns of 1932. ‘This really revolutionary revolution is to be achieved, not in the external world, but in the souls and flesh of human beings,’ he had claimed, and the signs were there in the existing research in ‘biology, physiology, and psychology’.

Alan Turing was no stranger to these subjects; his intellectual development had circled round to face the question of
Natural Wonders
: ‘By what process of becoming did I myself finally appear in this world?’ The significance of his mathematical work, indeed, rested upon the fact that specific substances, the ‘growth hormones’ referred to in his paper, had been chemically isolated by experimental biochemists. Amidst the patient accumulation of facts, the discoveries of the sexual hormones since 1889 had engendered a particular interest. Such interest, both lay and scientific, was not confined to the role of the hormones in physiological growth. It was widely asserted that the ‘chemical messages’, at which E.T. Brewster had marvelled in 1912, determined the psychology as well as the physiology of the individual.

If, to the more old-fashioned person, the problem of homosexuality remained one of ‘filth’ and indiscipline, of which as little was to be said as
possible, the modern psychological view was dominated by the categories of ‘masculine and ‘feminine’, with a belief that gay men and lesbian women had been endowed by nature with some unusual mixture of these all-important characteristics.
^*
One attraction of this view was that it left intact an assumption of universal heterosexuality, since these apparent exceptions could be defined away as cases where a woman was ‘really’ a man, or
vice versa
. Some found in this theory a scientific justification of homosexuality, according to the logic of the age, others found the hope of solving the hitherto unsolvable problem that it posed.

The discovery of the hormones suggested that the eternal verities of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ might, indeed, be embodied in a simple chemical form. It was appropriate to a decade in which these great truths were so sedulously cultivated by Hollywood that the first major American experiments to test this theory were made at Los Angeles in 1940. The endocrinologists estimated the quantity of male hormones, or androgens, and of female hormones, or oestrogens, in the urine of seventeen homosexual men who had been ‘taken into custody’. They did the same for thirty-one ‘normal males’. Their results showed that even for a single individual this ratio could vary from time to time by a factor of up to thirteen. However, a judicious averaging of the ratios suggested that gay men had an androgen-oestrogen ratio of only sixty per cent of the others.
^†

The data were intimately bound up with instructions. Dr Glass, describing this result,
¹⁰
explained that ‘Obviously, if a biologic etiology were established, this would lead to investigation of therapeutic possibilities from a much wider perspective than now exists,’ which in English meant that if they could find a chemical to turn homosexuals into heterosexuals, then they could use it.
^‡
So in 1944 Glass experimented
¹¹
with the injection into some eleven gay men of male hormones ‘kindly supplied’ by pharmaceutical companies. ‘Four subjects accepted organotherapy by compulsion’ – a court order in one case, and parental authority in the case of three boys. Alas, the
experiment was not a success, in Dr Glass’s opinion. ‘Only three of the subjects reported benefit from this therapy. Five reported an intensification of the homosexual drive.’ This to the scientists was ‘a worsening of the condition’. It did not help in ‘the clinical management of the male homosexual.’

Back at the drawing board of endocrinology, the failure of the experiment suggested a diametrically opposite approach. If the male hormone
increased
sexual ‘drive’, then perhaps the female hormone would
decrease
it – for heterosexual and homosexual men alike. This bright idea had already been tried
¹²
by another American pioneer, C.W. Dunn, in 1940. He had reported that ‘At the end of the treatment there was a complete absence of libido.’

One attraction of this technique was that it was so much more effective than physical castration. Surgery of this kind had held a traditional part in the American Way, especially since the eugenic clean-up of the late nineteenth century. In 1950 there were eleven states which allowed for compulsory castration, with fifty thousand cases on record.
¹³
But there was also scientific evidence that castration did not successfully inhibit sexual activity, and in this respect the chemical approach was more promising.

This was the lesson drawn by the first British paper
¹⁴
on the subject, which appeared in the pages of the
Lancet
just a few days after Jefferson invoked the supremely human ‘charm of sex’ in his Lister Oration. It appeared under the authoritative name of F.L. Golla, director of the progressive Burden Neurological Institute at Bristol, where Grey Walter had built his cybernetic tortoises.
^*
Neither compulsory nor voluntary castration was allowed in Britain. On the other hand, as he wrote, ‘The Criminal Justice Act, 1948, had emphasised the duty of the community to provide treatment for the habitual sexual offender.’ Hormone dosage resolved this contradiction, being both legal, and more effective. By 1949 Golla had experimented on thirteen men, and found that with sufficiently large doses ‘libido could be abolished within a month.’ He concluded:

In view of the non-mutilating nature of this treatment and the ease with which it can be administered to a consenting patient we believe that it should be adopted whenever possible in male cases of abnormal and uncontrollable sexual urge.

He had opened the visionary prospect of providing chemical castration for all homosexual men. In 1952, the
Sunday Pictorial
commented that

What is needed is a new establishment for them like Broadmoor. It should be a clinic rather than a prison, and these men should be sent there and kept there until they are cured. Doctors and psychiatrists would welcome the idea. There is still a great deal to be learned about the delicately balanced endocrine glands which determine whether or not a man could take to these unpleasant activities.

L. R. Broster, the Charing Cross Hospital specialist who has done pioneer work in this field, writes that surgical treatment has made great strides recently but ‘is still in the groping stage of trial and error’.

The possibilities had, in fact, widened into a more ambitious sphere of human management. Another paper
¹⁵
described how the
male
hormone had been administered to a fourteen-year-old truant:

For many years he had shrunk from personal
contacts, been sensitive, shy and latterly more solitary. Recently he had become morbidly preoccupied with thoughts on abstruse topics beyond his years, chiefly psychology and religion… In the ward he read a lot, wrote many letters, helped with domestic jobs, showed interest in philosophy, but mixed little with others.

But after a course of the drug

his religious and other preoccupations disappeared. The drug was stopped and he was discharged, much improved. Six months later he was reported to have a job at a printers, but still apt to speculate on religion, and to be readily teased by other youngsters.

Perhaps the fourteen-year-old Alan Turing would have benefited more from such scientific treatment than from the rough-and-ready team games. On the other hand, it was the
female
hormone which according to this authority had

been most useful in controlling occasional outbreaks of homosexual behaviour in the 12 to 16 age groups.

More effective than cold baths, or Nowell Smith’s eloquence, it was the oestrogen which had been useful in ‘enabling one of the provisions of the Criminal Justice Act, 1948, to be carried out.’ It was the beginning of a new era, in which chemical solutions could be found for the problems of social control.