Many people are familiar with what happened to Alan Turing: the national hero and genius of the first order who was prosecuted in 1952 because of his homosexuality and “chemically castrated” as a sanction of the state. And following this conviction and punishment, he was to apparently kill himself two years later aged only 41.
The immensity of his intellectual accomplishments and his crucial contribution to the war effort make the prosecution of Turing and its aftermath seem a particular tragedy. Something very badly went wrong, and that wrong needs to be righted. Indeed, as Jack Goode, a colleague of Turing at Bletchley Park, said:
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