Alan Mathison Turing (1912-1954) was one of the greatest computer geniuses in history , which is why he is known as the “father of computing”. This mathematician, philosopher and scientist, whose contributions in the field of cryptography prevented thousands of deaths in World War II, shortening it by several years thanks to his decoding of Nazi secrets, has a lesser-known but no less important aspect: that of the field of biology and chemistry .
It is in this field that today, 60 years after his death , a team of researchers from the universities of Brandeis and Pittsburgh have certified the validity of Turing’s theory of chemical morphogenesis , formulated in 1952, shortly before committing suicide.
The research involved finding out how identical copies of a single cell differ, for example, in an organism with arms and legs, a head and a tail . Turing was the first to offer an explanation of chemical morphogenesis. He theorized that identical biological cells differentiate, change shape, and create patterns through a process called intercellular diffusion-reaction. In this model, a system of chemicals react with each other and diffuse through a space, between the cells of an embryo. These chemical reactions need an inhibitory agent, to suppress the reaction and an excitatory agent, to activate the reaction . This chemical reaction, diffused through an embryo, will create chemically different cell patterns. Turing predicted up to six different patterns that could emerge from this model.
To validate Turing’s theory, the researchers created rings of synthetic cell-like structures by inhibiting and activating chemical reactions to test this theory. As Turing theorized, the scientists looked at all six chemically different cell patterns and one more that was not predicted by Turing .
The results of this research that have been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) will have a great impact on the study of biological development as well as on materials science.
If 2012 was a memorable year for the figure of this great genius for the celebration of his centenary , 2014 is not far behind with the validation of this theory and the next release of the film about Alan Turing (“ The Imitation Game ”) who will play the actor Benedict Cumberbatch and which is based on the book by Adrew Hodges, ” Alan Turing: The Enigma .”
