Alan Turing's Death - A Lesson To Be Learned?

[paigetheoracle]

If oestrogen destroyed Alan Turing's brain, could it be reverse engineered to treat dementia patients, through testosterone injections? In this way his death as well as his life, could count for something as he said he hoped his work would, with regards to the death of his school friend, who died of TB. Looking at the documentary on Channel Four in The UK, it seemed this hormone was linked to his creative genius and the chemical castration removed not only his sexual desire but his ability to see and create connections - jumps in our understanding of the mind as a computer (CS Forester 'Only connect...'). If he became muddle headed and his mathematical genius subsided, perhaps this explains why women are more likely to be depressives than men and ultimately why he killed himself. Memory and connection go together as does a love of life and innocence because it leads us to explore the world, rather than retreat from it. Guilt hides things (persecutes), whereas innocence has the courage to openly display the truth as it sees it. Ironically he helped save the world from Nazi Germany, which persecuted homosexuals, only to fall foul of it in his own country. Imagine what else he would have discovered, had he lived to twice the age he died at?

 

'I don't see things others don't. I just recognize as much as you do, how much is unseen' says the character of his psychiatrist, Franz Greenbaum. Isn't that what all genius does?

[Qfwfq]

If oestrogen destroyed Alan Turing's brain, could it be reverse engineered to treat dementia patients, through testosterone injections?

If a hammer seriously damaged Michelangelo's Pietà, could anvils be used to restore works of art?

[CraigD]

If oestrogen destroyed Alan Turing's brain ...

… but estrogen didn’t, by any reasonable scientific account, destroy Turing’s brain.

 

By most and the best accepted accounts, his career and reputation were damaged after he was convicted of “gross indecency” for having homosexual sex, leading to his suicide.

 

In order to avoid imprisonment, after a bold but unsuccessful legal defense, Turing agreed to and underwent a 1 year long course of treatment consisting of estrogen injections to make it more difficult for him to feel sexual desire and have an erection. About 1 year after these treatments and his probation ended, Turing appears to have committed suicide by taking a large dose of cyanide, perhaps in the apple found half-eaten beside his body.

 

Although some biographers, historians, and friends and acquaintances of Turing have speculated that his suicide was caused by his distress at linger effect of his hormone treatment, I’m aware of no writing by or recounted conversations with him supporting this speculation. I’ve read accounts that Turing complained of physical discomfort from side effects of his treatment, such as breast swelling and mood changes, but none that he “became muddle headed”, or continued to feel ill effects of the treatment long after ending it.

 

His criminal conviction resulted in the revocation of his military security clearances, effectively ending his military cryptography career, and also prevented him from traveling to countries with laws banning travel to them by people convicted of “moral turpitude”, including the US, hampering his mathematical and computer science career. However, Turing’s appointment to Manchester U was never threatened, and he continued to have access to some of the best computers in existence, access to and correspondence with top mathematicians and computer scientists, and to study and write papers. Contrary to some popular opinion, he didn’t withdraw from life or emotionally collapse. He didn’t even stop having homosexual relationships, there being evidence that he had at least one after his conviction, with a man in Denmark during a holiday (vacation) trip there.

 

I doubt we’ll ever know with much certainty how and why Turing died at age 41, but as reasonable an explanation as any I’ve encountered is that it was due to feelings of resignation and futility about efforts to legalize homosexuality. Prior to and during his 1952 trial, he was notably unapologetic about his homosexuality, reportedly even telling police that he expected a royal commission would soon legalize it. Discovering that the society he felt so accepted by, as a war hero, which he imagined would soon eliminated outmoded laws rooted in religious dogma, was more deeply conservative and disapproving of his sexuality than he hoped, was, I imagine, a grave emotional blow to him.

 

In short, estrogen didn’t kill Turing. Turing killed himself, for which his society and government are in part to blame. I’m proud that the UK, US, and most other countries that treated homosexuality as a crime 60 years ago now do not. Had these stupid and repressive laws been repealed when Turing was alive, he might have done decades more of brilliant mathematics, advancing the state of the art who knows how much?

 

Psychologist Romeo Vitelli’s recent blog paper, The Turing Problem, has a good seeming, but alas unsourced, account of Turing’s last 28 months of life, from which I get most of the above.