The Secret Life of Chaos Page #3

depending on circumstances.

But what it doesn't do

is explain where that pattern

comes from in the first place.

That's the real mystery.

And so, what Turing had done

was to suddenly provide

an accessible chemical mechanism

for doing this. That was amazing.

Turing was onto a really big,

bold idea.

But sadly, we can only speculate

how his extraordinary mind

would have developed his idea.

Shortly after his groundbreaking

paper on morphogenesis,

a dreadful and completely

avoidable tragedy destroyed his life.

After his work

breaking codes at Bletchley Park,

you might well have assumed that

Turing would have been honoured

by the country

he did so much to protect.

This couldn't be

further from the truth.

What happened to him after the war

was a great tragedy,

and one of the most shameful episodes

in the history of British science.

The same year Turing

published his morphogenesis paper,

he had a brief affair

with a man called Arnold Murray.

The affair went sour

and Murray was involved in

a burglary at Turing's house.

But when Turing reported

this to the police,

they arrested him as well as Murray.

In court, the prosecution argued

that Turing, with his university

education, had led Murray astray.

He was convicted of gross indecency.

The judge then offered Turing

a dreadful choice.

He could either go to prison,

or sign up to a regime of

female hormone injections

to cure him of his homosexuality.

He chose the latter, and it was to

send him into a spiral of depression.

On 8 June 1954, Turing's

body was found by his cleaner.

He'd died the day before

by taking a bite from an apple

he'd laced with cyanide,

ending his own life.

Alan Turing died aged just 41.

The loss to science is incalculable.

Turing would never know

that his ideas would inspire

an entirely new mathematical

approach to biology,

and that scientists would

find equations like his

really do explain many of the shapes

that appear on living organisms.

Looking back, we now know

Turing had really grasped the idea

that the wonders of creation are

derived from the simplest of rules.

He had, perhaps unexpectedly,

taken the first step

to a new kind of science.

The next step in the story was

just as unexpected,

and in many ways,

just as tragic as Turing's.

In the early 1950s, around the time

of Turing's seminal paper

on morphogenesis, a brilliant

Russian chemist by the name of

Boris Belousov

was beginning his own investigations

into the chemistry of nature.

Deep behind the iron curtain, in a

lab at the Soviet Ministry of Health,

he was beginning to investigate

the way our bodies

extract energy from sugars.

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