Turing's Theory of Chemical Morphogenesis Validated 60 Years After His Death 74
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.""
Re: Alan Turing was Gay (Score:4, Informative)
...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.
Please stop linking paywalled papers. (Score:5, Insightful)
Science should be readable by anyone.
Don't advertise the profiteers.
Re: Please stop linking paywalled papers. (Score:1)
Chuck Peta!
Re: Please stop linking paywalled papers. (Score:2, Funny)
Fuck parent up, remember to mod beta.
Re: (Score:2)
Someone's got to pay to fund the research.
Re:Please stop linking paywalled papers. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Please stop linking paywalled papers. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
The publishers aren't paying for research. If anything, they're taking money away from research by charging too much for journals and, in many cases, additional fees to authors to get their work published. Most of the money paying for research comes from government grants, and thus ultimately from the public, and then the journal publishers try to lock it up and make everyone pay a second time to see the work they've already paid for.
Re:Please stop linking paywalled papers. (Score:5, Interesting)
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: (Score:2)
On Turing (Score:3)
Is there nothing he couldn't do?
Re:On Turing (Score:5, Funny)
Is there nothing he couldn't do?
Women.
(I kid, I kid.)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, he could not do women and candied apples.
You should have seen his latest attempt.
(Yes, I am kidding as well - I find it very sad that he was not able to do more in his life due to the stupid laws of his time).
Re: (Score:2)
I don't get it. What's the candied apples thing all about?
Re: (Score:1)
Turing is widely regarded to have commited suicide by eating an arsenic-laced apple.
Re:On Turing (Score:4, Interesting)
No not arsenic, cyanide:
Although.... that isn't the whole story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... [wikipedia.org]
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: (Score:2)
Is there nothing he couldn't do?
Women.
(I kid, I kid.)
Actually, he probably could but wasn't interested. No that I am done being pedantic (I'd say anal retentive but that would be too obvious in this discussion), imagine what he could have done but didn't because of how society treated him? What insights and ideas did we lose?
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Father a child?
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
He was gay, which is one obstacle.
Then they castrated him for being gay.
Re: (Score:3)
Chemically, not surgically.
Re: (Score:3)
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: (Score:2)
Implying that he could still father a child?
Yes. He'd certainly find it a lot easier than if they'd cut his knackers off. Chemical castration reduces libido but does not, as far as I can ascertain, impair actual fertility. And it's reversible.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Is there nothing he couldn't do?
Withhold certain information while talking to cops.
Details? (Score:5, Interesting)
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: (Score:2)
In order to save time and 30 replies, the answer is Yes and No to all of your questions. And at least three posts explaining why they were silly questions.
Re: (Score:2)
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:
long ago (Score:3)
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 (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
It's not uncommon for an eponymous award to be won by the person it's named after. In fact, they're often the first person to win it, if they're alive.
Alas, if only that had been the case for Alan Turing.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for respecting my views. I certainly didn't mean any disrespect to yours -- in fact, I agree with them. Your original post was (rightly) modded funny. I was just adding some information.
Chemistry vs Molecular Biology (Score:5, Informative)
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
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 enco