there's some truth to this. As a child I recall being taught that some scientists thought hormones could treat homosexuality, as it was considered an illness.

It's amazing how ignorant we were just 50 years ago, and likely still are :)

What's particularly sad about Turing was that he was such a great war hero. We make movies about famous spies capturing machines behind enemy lines, when the reality was largely Turing and I believe a group of polish refugees slaving away in basements building computers.

Captured machines did play a fair part in the codebreaking!

I would say the saddest thing about Turing related to the Government is simply that his work went absolutely unacknowledged for so long. I actually visited Bletchley Park last weekend and a curator told me of a woman in her late eighties who, even now, had an ingrained attitude of "I can't talk about it". (She was a Wren working at Bletchley).

I think it was thirty years or so before anyone even knew the massive contributions this man had made to our science.

Well, the spies under the direction of England's SOE (special operations executive) spent a lot of their time cutting transmission lines throughout occupied Europe. This was done so the Germans had to broadcast their signals via wireless, allowing Turing and Bletchley Park to intercept and break them much more often.

I highly recommend a book called Between Silk and Cyanide, written by the head of codes (cryptography) of SOE during World War II.