Computing with Quantum Cats by John Gribbin Page B

1951, the results were broadcast by the BBC—on Children's Hour . 20 Turing also wrote his letters on the Manchester computer's keyboard, thereby probably becoming the first person to use a word processor. 21
    Turing's principal contribution was typically Turing, and the antithesis of what he called “the American tradition”: a very efficient programming system that was easy for Turing to work with, using binary code, but almost impossible for anyone with a lesser intellect to get to grips with. It was Tony Brooker, who joined the team in October 1951, who worked out how to write programs in a language that looked like algebraic expressions, which were translated automatically into the code the machine understood. This was the first publicly available “high-level” computer language, the forerunner of things like Fortran and Algol.
    By the time Brooker came on the scene, Turing, recently elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, had essentially moved on from artificial computing systems, and was deeply immersed in the puzzle of morphogenesis, the biology of how organisms grow and develop. While DEUCE, EDSAC, the Manchester team and other British projects (one developingfrom secret work for the Admiralty, another at Birkbeck College in London) developed towards the kind of computers we know today, Turing was again ahead of the pack, puzzling over the way living things are controlled by their “programming.” His paper “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis,” published in 1952, is regarded as being as important in this field as “On Computable Numbers” is in its own.
    But by then time was running out for Turing. Early in 1952 he had a brief homosexual relationship with a nineteen-year-old boy who was then involved in a burglary of Turing's house in Manchester. Turing reported the burglary to the police, naively expecting them to help him; when they found out about the relationship they arrested Turing, 22 who was charged and convicted of the offence that “being a male person [he had] committed an act of gross indecency with…a male person.” His burglarious “friend” was convicted of the same offence, but seen as Turing's victim and discharged. Turing was put on probation, on condition he took a course of hormone treatment. The court probably thought it was being lenient, but the “treatment,” with the female hormone estrogen, made him impotent and fat, and, worst of all, affected his ability to think clearly and concentrate.
    These events are often linked to his untimely death in 1954, officially determined to be suicide. The situation is in fact rather more complicated than the coroner's verdict suggests. At the time of his death the hormone treatment had been over for a year, and friends describe him as being happy. Work was going well. He had left a “to do” list for himself at work before going home for the weekend, and rather than a suicide note he left behind ready to post a letter accepting an invitation to a forthcoming event at the Royal Society.Nothing suggests a suicidal frame of mind. So why the verdict? Well, he did die of cyanide poisoning, and there was a partly eaten apple by his bedside, recalling the couplet from Snow White :
    Dip the apple in the brew,
    Let the Sleeping Death seep through.
    Bizarrely, though, the apple was never tested to see if it contained cyanide, and Turing had a home laboratory (little more than a glorified cupboard) where, just as in his childhood, he dabbled with chemistry experiments. Some of these involved electroplating using potassium cyanide solution, and police called to the scene reported a strong smell of cyanide (the famous “bitter almonds” smell) in the room. A jam jar containing cyanide solution was standing, uncovered, on the table in Turing's “lab.” Perhaps significantly, the ability to smell cyanide diminishes over time, as the concentration of the gas increases, and