Alan Turing’s Death by Cyanide

In our final post in this week’s series on poisonings in history, I am featuring Alan Turing’s death by cyanide. Turing was, of course, the famous father of theoretical computer science, paving the way for Artificial Intelligence in his development of the “Turing machine,” a mathematical model of computation that enabled much of what we think of as computer programming to develop. He helped the British government during World War II by breaking German secret codes, which makes the brutal treatment he suffered all the more appalling.

Due to extreme homophobia, gay sexual relationships were illegal, and when the British government found out that Turing had a male lover, they charged him as a criminal and told him he could be chemically “castrated” or go to prison. He chose the former. Two years later, in 1954, Turing was found dead in his bed, having been poisoned by cyanide. This chemical blocks the cells from using oxygen and has a history of being used in suicides, and the inquest that followed Turing’s death decreed this to be the case. After all, a half-eaten apple was found on his bedstand, and Turing was known to have a fascination with the story of Snow White and the red apple that nearly caused her death.

However, recent work by Jack Copeland has suggested that Alan Turing’s death was not in fact a suicide but an accident. His argument is fuller than what I can present here, but the apple was never tested for poison, Turing was known to work experiments with cyanide, he had been in a good mood before his death, and the coroner had written in his report that “in a man of his type, one never knows what his mental processes are going to do next” — in other words, homophobia might have drawn this conclusion.

Copeland’s argument brings up a good point about Turing, though. Paying more attention to his genius and contributions (he saved countless lives in WWII and may have shortened the conflict by as much as two years), rather than fettishizing his death, might do the man greater honor. In 2009 the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown publically apologized on behalf of his government for the horrible treatment of Turing.