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Turing Archive Director Questions Alan Turing Suicide Report
That Alan Turing committed suicide is widely accepted as fact. Now, an anonymous reader writes, "According to Professor Jack Copeland, director of the The Turing Archive for the History of Computing, 'The coroner [in Turing's case] didn't really investigate the evidence at all, he just jumped to the conclusion that he committed suicide. He seems to have been very biased from the statements in newspapers at the time.' Copeland further said that medical evidence suggested Turing died from inhaling cyanide rather than drinking or ingesting it."
Slashdot's finally gotten to the point where its stories are driven by the Google Doodle!
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It's only been a mere 58 years. Now is the time to look into this.
His suicide was widely reported as fact. I have serious doubts that anyone who looked into the life of Turing actually believed that his suicide was a fact. (Opinions seemed to vary from conspiracy theories focussed on a government assassination, to it was probably suicide but the investigation was so botched up that we'll never know.)
As a chemist who has worked with cyanide, I question whether he would have chosen this method to end his own life. Cyanide poisoning is extremely unpleasant and chemists who work with it generally are aware of this. Cyanide gas is very easy to produce from cyanide solutions, just a matter of adjusting or failing to adjust the pH. I have given myself low level cyanide poisoning without being aware of it until the symptoms appeared hours later, and many others have been saved by having the antidote at hand when they realized they had been exposed.
The gas could easily have been produced in his laboratory by his own accident or neglect, or by someone else.
In my opinion Turing's death by cyanide poisoning was not an intentional suicide.
Verbum caro factum est
Back in the 1950s, anyone who was gay was considered as being vulnerable to blackmail by the "filthy reds", who could threaten to expose them unless the subject agreed to work undercover for the commies.
They even applied this standard to the relatively few people who were OPENLY gay, even though there was no basis for exposing somebody who was already out of the closet.
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So you're suggesting that one of the greatest polymaths since Eratosthenes had the the mentality of a 5 year old girl, in part because he was gay?
Verbum caro factum est
Please note that most seem to be construing this news as a cue to believe that Turing may have been murdered (by the British government, naturally), when in reality, Prof Jack Copeland, the foremost Turing scholar, and Turing's own mother thought it to be a careless accident rather than a suicide, with Copeland saying "the evidence should be taken at face value - that an accidental death is certainly consistent with all the currently known circumstances." The truth is that the initial inquest was so sloppy we will never know for certain, so those who are apt to believe in government conspiracies will no doubt believe he was assassinated (after he was already subject to humiliating chemical castration), even as the premier Turing expert believes it was more likely an accident.
The beeb has an article that addresses the apple thing--he often ate an apple before bedtime, so the fact that a half-eaten apple was found on his night stand wasn't unusual at all, and the apple was never tested for cyanide.
Because if he didn't kill himself that very day, it isn't a plausible cause?
Mind the Gap
That's the thing - no one knows for certain (no diary entries, notes, conversations with friends, etc) that would indicate either way, and yet it's being pushed as direct causation.
Plausible? Maybe. Possible? Certainly. Probable? Unknown.
OTOH, I don't like how quickly and easily correlation instantly becomes causation and gets pressed into an ideological cause... no matter who does it, or why they do it.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
That his personal and professional life was destroyed by bigotry due to his homosexuality is well established and uncontroversial. If he did commit suicide, then the existence of a causal link is nearly inevitable. The part that hasn't been well established is whether he did, in fact, commit suicide.
(Correlation can imply causation if there is no other viable cause and the absence of a cause is unlikely. He could have suffered a devastating mental illness that made him suicidal, but there is no evidence of this, whereas the discrimination is well documented.)