Alan Turing-May He Finally Rest in Peace

Gordon Brown's official statement on Alan Turing

2009 has been a year of deep reflection - a chance for Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before. A unique combination of anniversaries and events have stirred in us that sense of pride and gratitude which characterise the British experience. Earlier this year I stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to honour the service and the sacrifice of the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which have passed since the British government declared its willingness to take up arms against Fascism and declared the outbreak of World War Two. So I am both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists, historians and LGBT activists, we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing.

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ - in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence - and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison - was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.

Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.

I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue.

But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in living memory, people could become so consumed by hate - by anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices - that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls which had marked out the European civilisation for hundreds of years. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.

So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.

Gordon Brown

The Fuzziness of Boundaries-Max Delbrück

In the summer of 1941, a young man-only 34 years old-showed up for the first time at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Campus. He would ultimately become the leader of a generation of scientists who would establish the field of molecular biology. His name was Max Delbrück. Max was born in Berlin. His father Hans, was a professor of history at the University of Berlin and his mother was the grand-daughter of Justus von Liebig (of chemistry fame).

His early interests were directed towards astronomy. However, during the latter part of his graduate studies in Göttingen, the breakthroughs in quantum mechanics caused him to shift to theoretical physics. He obtained his Ph.D in 1930 following which he went back to Berlin and worked as an assistant to Lise Meitner, It was during this time that he discovered the theoretical basis of gamma ray scattering by a Coulomb field, a phenomenon that to this date bears his name, Delbrück scattering.

In 1937, he moved to Caltech, in the United States, where he teamed up with Emory Ellis doing phage research. Together, they demonstrated that viruses reproduce in one step, rather than exponentially (as cellular organisms do). Following the start of World War II, Delbrück chose to remain in the United States, teaching physics at Vanderbilt University while conducting genetic research. His claim to biological fame came with the establishment of the famous "Phage Group" with Salvador Luria and Alfred Hershey at the CSHL . In 1943, he and Luria demonstrated that genetic mutations in bacteria arise in the absence of selection and not as a response to selection. This work was significantly backed up by mathematical models that they developed which were consistent with experimental results. He shared the 1969 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology with Luria.

His name may not be as familiar as Albert Einstein or Charles Darwin, but Max Delbrück was a scientific giant who changed the world through his research in modern biology. He saw no barriers between the sciences.  He had with him his tools from physics and mathematics and the problems from biology. In an essay commemorating Delbrück's 60th birthday, Luria wrote "Seldom has a group been so richly rewarded as have we, the molecular biologist, whom the physicist Max Delbrück, more than anyone else, guided to the explorations of the deep mysteries of life".

In the words of the great man himself

A Max Sing-Along 

(lyrics by Max Delbrück, 1968)

I was born about 100 years ago 

And there is nothing in this world that I don't know

I have Mendel in the garden

And I steered the ship for Darwin

I showed Otto how the neutrons had to go!

I had Watson grab the helix by the tail

I told Morgan that the flies would never fail

And the prize that went to Feynman

Well the theory was mine man,

And my song and inspiration never stale!

And, my buddy, Linus owes a debt to me,

For the structure of his modern chemistry,

Of the phage I am the father,

But I didn't want the bother,

Of collecting data so statistic-al-ly!

I'm a single-minded scientific man....