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

Please stop linking paywalled papers.

[xophos]

Science should be readable by anyone.
Don't advertise the profiteers.

Re: Please stop linking paywalled papers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck parent up, remember to mod beta.

Re:Please stop linking paywalled papers.

[cduffy]

Someone's got to pay to fund the research.

...but that someone isn't generally the publishers running the paywalls, so how is that relevant?

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:Please stop linking paywalled papers.

[turning in circles]

PNAS has an option where the researcher uses $1,350 or $1,000 funds to make the research Open Access. The money to do this can be written into grants. Alternatively, the researchers can publish in another journal that is open access (again for a fee). So, blame the researcher, not the journal.

Re:Please stop linking paywalled papers.

[cduffy]

publishers pay the people who fronted money for the study

If only they did.

Funds paid to scientific publishers pay for editing, not for the original studies. Moreover, peer review -- the most important part of the process -- is almost universally done for free by other scientists in the field; the publishers are just mediators in that process, adding minimal value.

On Turing

[wonkey_monkey]

Is there nothing he couldn't do?

Re:On Turing

[DoofusOfDeath]

Is there nothing he couldn't do?

Women.

(I kid, I kid.)

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:On Turing

[wonkey_monkey]

Chemically, not surgically.

Re:On Turing

[wisnoskij]

Implying that he could still father a child? I know he was chemically castrated, but did not think the method was relevant, was I wrong?

Re:On Turing

[wisnoskij]

Depends. A lot of cultures put homosexuals into Shamen/Preists roles. The entire driving evolutionary force behind homosexuality I believe is to have free, unattached, men who could help the community instead of just their own families.

Yes, people without children were poor; Though I strongly disagree that they disliked each other, but homosexual males were meant to fill other societal roles.

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:Details?

[clawsoon]

Coincidentally, I was reading Chapter 21 of Molecular Biology of the Cell by Alberts et al last night, which discusses some of the many experiments which have been done to demonstrate the effect. Intercellular chemical gradients involving counteracting exciters and inhibitors are only one of many effects that control differentiation, however. There are also:

• - intracellular gradients leading to asymmetric cell division (e.g. the place where the sperm enters the egg creates a protein gradient across the egg that determines the future head/ass orientation of the body)
• - timing mechanisms (e.g. the on-off cycle that appears to be responsible for the development of vertebrae)
• - cell-to-cell contact, either directly with neighbours or over longer distances through tubes or spikes

So Turing figured out one of the mechanisms, and it was certainly an important accomplishment. If Google Scholar is telling the truth, his paper has over 8000 citations, including around 1,500 that mention "embryo", so his accomplishment hasn't been ignored. The claims of this new paper for novelty, though, seem a bit weaker.

long ago

[stenvar]

Creating artificial chemical structures based on his theory, like this paper seems to do, is a neat additional gimmick, but that has been done many times before. Even if it were new, it wouldn't be little more than a simulation of his equations; what counts is whether biology behaves like he predicted.

The real test of Turing's theory is whether it describes actual morphogenesis, and it has been shown to do that, many times over the years. That's the real "validation".

I think it's time

[invictusvoyd]

We should give him the Turing award .

Chemistry vs Molecular Biology

[wombatmobile]

Turing's theory was formulated in an era when physics and chemistry were the foundation components of biology. The problem he was trying to solve is: How is biological complexity achieved in terms of fundamental chemistry and physics? At the time, chemistry could explain how two poisonous chemicals, sodium and chlorine, could combine to produce a substance as benign as common table sale (NaCl). But nothing could explain how a single cell could develop into something as complex as a fish, or a mouse, or a human being.

In 1953, Crick and Watson published a paper in Nature that revealed the chemical structure of DNA. The discovery was a revolution in science because it changed biology from an amalgam of physics and chemistry into an information science. In DNA and RNA, a whole vocabulary of computing was encoded. Suddenly, the complexity of biological processes such as embryogenesis, heredity, and cancer could be understood in programmatic terms through the molecular language of DNA.

Turing's theory of chemical morphogenesis doesn't mention DNA. As such, it is too simple to explain morphogenesis per se. Rather, his concept of intercellular reaction-diffusion may be applied to cell biology inter alia, but it isn't the big picture. Crick and Watson worked that out, thanks in no small part to Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins.

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.

Re: Alan Turing was Gay

[Muros]

...and a pedophile, which is why he got prosecuted in the first place.

That is untrue. The prosecution was for "gross indecency" with a 19 year old man, who was also prosecuted.