SIR JOHN DERmOT TURING | 29
Consider one further example. Perhaps, outside academic circles, the least known of Alan’s
studies are his contributions in the field of morphogenesis: visitors find it curious that the
Turing building at Sherborne—not two minutes’ walk from where the photo was taken of him
in 1930—houses the school’s biology department. One might expect that the most visual of
his ideas would grab the imagination of many, but this chapter of his discoveries draws less
attention than the more abstract work on codes and mathematics. Maybe this is because of
an immense discovery in Cambridge towards the end of Alan’s short life: the famous paper by
Watson and Crick^10 on the structure of DNA was published in Nature on 25 April 1953, and
Alan’s work on diffusion in embryonic cells was eclipsed. After Alan’s death, developmental
biology became ‘molecular biology’, an idea so big that it swallowed an entire generation of bio-
logical scientists (including myself, I should confess, in a short career detour before I became
a lawyer). Alan’s centenary allows us a new perspective on this: we are reminded that there is
much more behind the growth of organisms than their DNA.
The centenary stimulated a wealth of new thinking. Barry Cooper’s Alan Turing Year web-
site lists over 250 events of various descriptions that commemorated Alan’s centenary year,^11
ranging from performances of new musical works to academic symposia of all flavours—my
favourite was one held on the island of Hai Nan Do in China, with all presentations delivered in
Esperanto. There seem to have been no fashion shows, but maybe that is for the best. Although
Alan would have abhorred the fuss in 2012, it is far better that the fuss should be about these
interesting things than about trivia such as his trousers.