Turing's Theory of Chemical Morphogenesis Validated 60 Years After His Death

cold fjord writes "Phys.org reports, "Alan Turing's accomplishments in computer science are well known, but lesser known is his impact on biology and chemistry. In his only paper on biology (PDF), Turing proposed a theory of morphogenesis, or how identical copies of a single cell differentiate, for example, into an organism with arms and legs, a head and tail. Now, 60 years after Turing's death, researchers from Brandeis University and the University of Pittsburgh have provided the first experimental evidence that validates Turing's theory in cell-like structures. The team published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, March 10.""

Comments

Details?

[wisnoskij]

Is this a huge find, will this make these scientists big names? Or was the reason it took so long to validate because no one really cared?

Was this expected, has everyone assumed he was right for a long time, or was their a lot of controversy?

Re:On Turing

[TheCarp]

No not arsenic, cyanide:

On 8 June 1954, Turing's cleaner found him dead. He had died the previous day. A post-mortem examination established that the cause of death was cyanide poisoning. When his body was discovered, an apple lay half-eaten beside his bed, and although the apple was not tested for cyanide
(wikipedia)

Although.... that isn't the whole story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

There is some speculation that he may have inhaled cyanide accidentlly, (which would be proposterous unless he had say... was doing gold electroplating in his house....oh which he was. He also apparently was known to eat an apple before bed nightly.

Now perhaps it was accidental, perhaps the whole gold plating thing was just to justify having cyanide around? Nobody is ever going to know.... but the poisioned apple makes for a nice story and adds a bit more mystery to the man than accidental inhalation of chemicals while trying to gold plate his silverware.

Re:Please stop linking paywalled papers.

[interkin3tic]

I agree that the papers should be open, but I disagree that not linking to the paywalled site is a good answer. Publishers of scientific journals don't get much money by individuals paying for papers. They get their money from universities and research institutions paying the toll. The paywall for individuals is just to keep forcing the universities paying. What you said is true for paywalls on general periodicals like wall street journal or new york times (if either still does that), since people actually might buy access to those articles. Not PNAS.

Furthermore, the primary source is important obviously. Most of the time with slashdot articles, you get a link to some three paragraph blurb in science daily or Time, and the actual paper is not linked in that article. Meanwhile, there are questions here that can only be answered by details which are in the actual paper but aren't in the blurby news story. These questions could be answered by people who do have access, but without a link to the paywalled paper, such people are less likely to bother tracking it down.

That criticism doesn't go for phys.org: they have the link to the actual paper at the bottom. Good on them.

Again, publicly funded research should be open access, I'm not saying paywalls are good or justified.

Re:Chemistry vs Molecular Biology

[Anonymous Coward]

Then again what the DNA and RNA actually perform is to encode chemicals which can trigger the reactions that Turing was describing in his paper. I agree with you that the discovery of this process was revolutionary (even more so once large scale decoding of DNA sequences started to happen), but ultimately it still is a chemical process which happens inside of cells.

Various chemical receptors can also trigger certain DNA sequences to be enabled or suppressed to in turn create other organic molecules as encoded in that DNA, hence the relevance.

Of course some people suggest that Maxwell basically discovered the Theory of Relativity with his equations of electrodynamics. If not necessarily discovering that theory, then certainly supported the theoretical background that Einstein later built upon. I think in this case Turing deserves a similar accolade for providing some early theoretical work that was built upon by later researchers... just as all good science tends to do anyway. Besides, it is otherwise just another citation of Turing's paper, which is still a good thing in terms of showing Turing actually did know what he was talking about.