Speakers

• Dr. John J. Tyson — Virginia Tech

Abstract

In a 1952 paper, Alan Turing showed that biochemicals, reacting and diffusing in a field of cells, could—in principle—spontaneously organize themselves into a stable spatial pattern of high and low concentrations. Turing suggested that these spatial patterns might possibly provide a mechanism for ‘morphogenesis’—the development of biological forms, such as tentacles, leaf whorls, feather primordia, and animal coat patterns. Although Turing’s paper is a classic of theoretical biology, it is notoriously difficult to read and understand. In this talk, I briefly review Turing’s life and his role in deciphering the German Enigma machine in WWII. Then I describe Turing’s analysis of spontaneous pattern formation in a modern context, to make it more accessible to biologists, biochemists and mathematicians. I will illustrate Turing’s predictions with simulations in one and two spatial dimensions and discuss briefly how they may be relevant to our present understanding of pattern formation in specific circumstances.

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