£ note character selection announcement Speech given by Mark Carney Governor of the Bank of England  Science and Industry Museum, Manchester 15 July 2019  I am grateful to Clare Macallan for her assistance in preparing these remarks, and to Matthew Corder, Toby Davies, Sarah John, Elizabeth Levett, Debbie Marriott and James Oxley for their help with background research and analysis. 1  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  It’s a pleasure to be at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester. These galleries testify to the UK’s rich history of discovery in science, technology and industry. A little more than eight months ago, the Bank sought to recognise the UK’s extraordinary scientific heritage by asking people across the country to “Think Science” in order to help us choose the character to feature on the new £ note. We were overwhelmed by the response. In six weeks, almost a quarter of a million nominations were submitted, from which we distilled a very long list of nearly 1,000 unique characters.1 The hard work of narrowing down these names to a shortlist of twelve options required the incomparable knowledge and tireless work of the Banknote Character Advisory Committee.2 On behalf of the Bank, I would like to thank the external members of the Advisory Committee – Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, Dr Emily Grossman, Professor Simon Schaffer, Dr Simon Singh, Professor Sir David Cannadine, Sandy Nairne and Baroness Lola Young – for their invaluable expert advice and unbridled enthusiasm.
His work prefigured the neural networks that are used today in applications such as cancer diagnosis and self-driving cars and as yet undiscovered new technologies of tomorrow. And the Turing Test, a method for determining whether a computer can exhibit intelligent behaviour indistinguishable from a human being, remains the benchmark for judging true artificial intelligence. Turing also leaves a very different, though no less important, legacy. In March 1952, he was convicted of Gross Indecency for his private relationship with a man, avoiding prison only by submitting to chemical castration. His security clearance was revoked for no reason other than his homosexuality, bringing to an end a promising post-war career as a consultant for GCHQ. He died shortly thereafter, on 7 June 1954, from cyanide poisoning. In 2009, the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official posthumous apology on behalf of the “government and all those who live freely thanks to Turing’s work” for his “utterly unfair” treatment.6 Turing received a royal pardon for his conviction in December 2013 and in 2017 the “Alan Turing Law” was passed, pardoning the nearly 50,000 men cautioned or convicted under now-rescinded historical legislation that outlawed homosexual acts. In the UK today, we are fortunate to live in more inclusive times.