#CBG_Thread

What connects Alan Turing - the father of computing with surreal patterns in chemical reactions and with leopard's spots?
1/n

Alan Turing was a brilliant mathematician who led UK's cryptography war room at Bletchley during World War 2. He created Bombe machine - primitive mechanical device to decipher Germany's Enigma code. He conceptualized Turing Machine which finally became a computer 2/n

After the war in 1952 it was discovered that Alan Turing was homosexual (a crime in UK those days). So he was chemically castrated. During that personally devastating time, Alan Turing wrote a paper on chemistry
"Chemical basis of Morphogenesis" which changed biology forever. 3/n

Morphogenesis in simpler terms talks about how shapes/patterns emerge. It applies to chemistry as well as biology. He described equations that showed how two opposing chemical agents, activator and inhibitor, created waves of visible patterns 4/n

His work was re-discovered in 1960s by a biochemist Anatoly Zhabotinsky who found that Turing's dense mathematical equations explained the patterns he saw in chemical reaction-diffusions experiments that produced beautiful patterns. 5/n

In 1980s scientists Meinhardt and James Murray were able to show that Turing’s theory explains how animals get patterns on their skins. From zebras to giraffes to leopards.
6/n

The genes that control melanin production in skin of animals have both activators and inhibitors. This leads to reaction - diffusion of morphogens that Turing had predicted, forming a wave of patterns on skin. 7/n

But Turing's equations aren't limited to biology or chemistry. You can see "Turing Patterns" in the shifting sands of sand dunes.

8/n

Infact you dont need to go any further, just see your fingertips, you can see beautiful Turing Patterns in the fingerprints.
9/n

It's a tragedy that just 2 years after his seminal paper, Alan Turing committed suicide in 1954 by biting into a cyanide laced apple. He could not take the social stigma anymore.

But his brilliant work lives among us. The End.