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The judge followed the barrister’s lead, sentencing Turing to 12 months’ probation and order-
ing him to ‘submit for treatment by a duly qualified medical practitioner at Manchester Royal
Infirmary’. It was not exactly the eulogy he deserved from the nation he had saved. Turing wrote
in a letter ‘No doubt I shall emerge from it all a different man, but quite who I’ve not found out’.
He signed the letter ‘Yours in distress’.^5
The alternative of prison would probably have cost him his job, and with it his access to a
computer. Already his arrest had cost him something else that mattered to him: as he told a
friend, he would never be able to work for GCHQ again.^6 After the war GCHQ—Bletchley
Park’s peacetime successor—had offered him the astronomical sum of £5000 to break post-war
codes (a figure more than six times his starting salary when he began work at the National
Physical Laboratory in 1945).^7 One of his Bletchley Park colleagues, Joan Clarke, who stayed on
as a peacetime codebreaker, confirmed that Turing visited GCHQ’s Eastcote site after the war
as a consultant.^8 But now Turing, the perfect patriot, had unwittingly become a security risk.
Probation and the ‘treatment’ from hell
The so-called treatment consisted of flooding his body with female hormones for a year.^9 ‘It is
supposed to reduce sexual urge whilst it goes on, but one is supposed to return to normal when
it is over’, Turing said, adding ‘I hope they’re right’.^10
Turing seems to have borne it all cheerfully enough, enduring his trial and the subsequent abu-
sive chemical ‘therapy’ with what his friend Peter Hilton described as ‘amused fortitude’. He even
regarded the hormone treatment ‘as a laugh’, his friend Don Bayley remembered.^11 Turing had
led a resilient life and his resilience did not desert him now. The whole thing was an episode to be
got through. ‘Being on probation my shining virtue was terrific, and had to be’, he said. ‘If I had so
much as parked my bicycle on the wrong side of the road there might have been 12 years for me’.^12
Turing told his friend Norman Routledge that he was growing breasts. ‘The fact that he had
grown breasts as a result of the treatment he regarded as rather a joke’, Routledge said.^13 The
inhumane ‘therapy’ was evidently wreaking havoc with Turing’s body, yet does not seem to have
had the effect that the authorities desired. Even towards the end of the treatment, when the
hormones would have been having their maximum impact, Turing was still finding young men
that he met ‘luscious’, and he said so in a letter to his friend Robin Gandy.^14
Despite the harshness of his personal life, Turing’s career was enjoying a new crescendo. The
logician turned codebreaker turned computer scientist turned artificial intelligence pioneer
had now turned mathematical biologist. In August 1952, as the organo-therapy dragged on,
the Royal Society published his groundbreaking paper describing his new theory of how things
grow (see Chapters 33–35). It described the first phase of Turing’s investigation into the chem-
istry of life.
During his probation, as alien hormones flooded through his body, Turing undertook the
next phase of the investigation: working long hours at the console, he used the Manchester com-
puter to simulate chemical processes described by his theory. In March 1953 two Cambridge
researchers, Francis Crick and James Watson, cracked the chemical structure of DNA. Watson
related that on the day of the discovery ‘Francis winged into the Eagle to tell everyone within
hearing distance that we had found the secret of life’.^15 Simultaneously, Turing was on the
brink of discovering an even deeper secret: as we grow in our mother’s womb, how does nature
achieve that miraculous leap from microscopic twists of DNA to actual anatomy?