'The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis', Alan Turing.
The last paper written by Alan Turing, "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis," [0] attempted to answer the theoretical explanation of the biological process that defines the shape of an embryonic organism from creation. This process is called "Morphogenesis". This is an important problem because complex organisms appear to be created by some "random" process that organises what appear to be self similar cells.
A lot of recent work has been done to experiment Turings ideas on "reaction-diffusion" processes describing morphogenesis in biology and other natural systems to see if a) they can be reproduced in the lab and b) mathematically model them. [1]
There is a pretty good broad outline of Turing and Morphogenesis in a BBC documentary, "The Secret Life of Chaos" [2] by Professor Jim Al-Khalili on Youtube. [3]
The last paper written by Alan Turing, "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis," [0] attempted to answer the theoretical explanation of the biological process that defines the shape of an embryonic organism from creation. This process is called "Morphogenesis". This is an important problem because complex organisms appear to be created by some "random" process that organises what appear to be self similar cells.
A lot of recent work has been done to experiment Turings ideas on "reaction-diffusion" processes describing morphogenesis in biology and other natural systems to see if a) they can be reproduced in the lab and b) mathematically model them. [1]
There is a pretty good broad outline of Turing and Morphogenesis in a BBC documentary, "The Secret Life of Chaos" [2] by Professor Jim Al-Khalili on Youtube. [3]
[0] Alan Turing, "THE CHEMICAL BASIS OF MORPHOGENESIS, http://www.dna.caltech.edu/courses/cs191/paperscs191/turing....
[1] Brandon Keim, Wired, "Alan Turing’s Patterns in Nature, and Beyond" http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/02/turing-patterns/?p....
[2] Jim Al-Khalili, "The Secret Life of Chaos" http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pv1c3
[3] Jim Al-Khalili, "The Secret Life of Chaos" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF7gdlTrCQY