Alan Turing - Aspergers - Suicide.

A few months ago on the BBC there were plenty of trailers for a new series.

The series was about the greatest person of the twentieth Century – Icons (in fact I think that was the title). Each episode would be introduced by a celebrity, who worked in the same field as the subject and they had episodes of Artists and Writers, Sports Stars etc. Thinking back I think there were six Icons of the century in each episode and the BBC audience would vote. They were voting for people like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King; Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill.

The following were the winners of each category:

ARTISTS & WRITERS WINNER. Pablo Picasso. Pioneering, genre-smashing modern artist.

SPORTS STARS WINNER. Muhammad Ali. Legendary Boxer.

ENTERTAINERS WINNER. David Bowie.

SCIENTISTS WINNER. Alan Turing.

EXPLORERS WINNER. Ernest Shackleton.LEADERS WINNER. Nelson Mandela.

Then they showed a final programme when all of the above were introduced and Alan Turing won.

Alan Turing turned out to be the Greatest Person of the twentieth Century.

The fact that a film about Turing's life had been released a couple of years ago with the super actor Benjamin Cumberbatch playing Alan Turing did no harm to the election.

The film was called The Imitation Game and kind of intimates that Alan Turing did it all by himself when it was actually a team effort from the Polish version of the Enigma Machine with the codes already broken by Polish cryptologists and mathematicians. Turing adapted their codes and built a machine to translate the messages and also guess some messages which were in plain text.

The women who worked at Bletchley Park had to learn Morse code as, indeed, I had to in a former life and found it quite a hard code although I learned the numbers very quickly but (to be honest) I was too idle to learn properly.

To take nothing away from Turing's feats, the film, which was quite a good one, used some silly Hollywood type tricks. One was the same as the one in A Beautiful Mind where John Nash is at a party with friends and when he sees an attractive woman enter the bar, with her not so attractive friend, he suddenly whoops that he has discovered the theory of equilibrium.

In The Imitation Game Alan Turing, as played by Cumberbatch, whoops 'we're going to shorten the war' – or words to that affect when he hears one of the Bletchley girls say something about the German on the other end of her line using the same greeting at the start of each message.

The fact that Alan Turing was able to work on the Enigma Machine was that he was a genius: he was a mathematician and cryptologist.

He also had Asperger's Syndrome. 
I first found out about Asperger's when I had a subscription to the New Yorker magazine whilst living in Los Angeles.

A contributor told a story about his own Asperger's, before it was generally recognised, of a trip he made from his school in Upper New York State to Yankee Stadium.

His class were told to write an essay about the trip and whilst the rest of his class wrote about the Baseball Game, mixing in the journey, the Bronx, and the game itself; he just described the bus and its décor. He didn't get the full message and that is what Asperger's is – they don't get all the messages. They are literally just like Spock in Star Trek – and, by the way is that an Oxford comma back there after Bronx??

Asperger's is a kind of autism – it's the spiral that starts with total none communication with the world. No speech, no understanding, nothing. It can be like the character in Rain Man played by Dustin Hoffman to Steven Spielberg who is reputed to be on the spiral.

I have known a few people with the condition and, just for the record, I am not in contact with any of the examples mentioned in this post – especially Stephen Spielberg!!

All of the examples of Asperger's, whom I have met, have a plan for suicide. Now I don't know if this is a symptom of it or just a coincidence. Robin Williams had Asperger's – he hung himself; more to the tragedy is that there was evidence of him trying a few things before hanging himself like marks on his wrists.

One friend told me that his plan was to row out into the middle of a lake with a gun. Then he would get rid of the oars, shoot holes into the boat then shoot himself in the head.

Another friend wrote and asked me if he committed suicide on Stinson Beach in Northern California would I go to his funeral?

Alan Turing committed suicide in the 1950s long after he helped shorten World War II.

There are theories that he was murdered by the CIA – MI6 – MI5 or whatever and the theory of it is that as he was an homosexual and was open to blackmail by the Russians and the secret service killed him to prevent the blackmail.

There was a spy, sometime in the 1950s again, who had the unfortunate name of Vassal. He was gay and was subject to blackmail and forced into spying for the enemy.

But Turing died from Cyanide poisoning.

Here's another piece of information: Alan Turing would take an apple to bed with him every night and on the day he died he was found with a half eaten apple and cyanide poisoning.

Maybe if he did kill himself, and there is speculation to the contrary, he took the cyanide then a bite of the apple to get rid of the taste, help the poison go down – I don't know.

But if you bite, deep into an apple, you will get a bitter taste from the tiny black seeds. Unlike the sweet tang of the fruit, the tiny black seeds are another story. They contain amygdalin, a substance that releases cyanide when it comes into contact with human digestive enzymes.

I leave it to you your honour. 

                       The Enigma Machine