Alan Turing and biology

Alan Turing spent his final years working at the University of Manchester. A little known feature of this work, his interest in morphogenesis, is described. It is argued that this work is both analogous to Turing´s computing work, in that it represented a radical break into a new field with little reference to previous work, and discontinuous with it, since Turing did not make use of any of the obvious analogies between programming a computer and programming a gene.<>