'The genius Britain betrayed'....
Martin Postranecky <mp-/[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.science.cryptography.bletchley-park |
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The Times
July 14, 2006
The genius Britain betrayed
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Ben Macintyre
France has apologised for Dreyfus, now we must make amends for Alan
Turing, our national scapegoat..../snip/
....The same apology should now be extended, in Britain, for Alan Turing.
At first sight, there might seem to be little in common between the
French officer and the oddball Cambridge mathematician who helped to win
the Second World War by breaking Nazi codes, and thus created a
blueprint for the modern computer. But both were patriots and heroes,
and both were victimised, amid fear of foreign espionage, because they
were different : Dreyfus for being Jewish, and Turing because he was
homosexual.
Turing was found dead in his bed, in 1954, at the age of 41, after taking
a bite from an apple laced with cyanide. Two years before he had been
convicted of gross indecency for a homosexual affair, and forced to
undergo oestrogen hormone injections, a primitive attempt to "cure"
his sexual inclinations that caused him to grow breasts. His arrest and
conviction led, in the words of David Leavitt, his latest biographer, to
"a slow, sad decent into grief and madness"..../snip/
see :
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,6-2269380,00.html
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