Manchester Museum celebrates Turing

Alan Turing and Life’s Enigma

The Manchester Museum celebrates the centenary of one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers
 
24 March – 18 November  2012 - Free entry

This March The Manchester Museum launches an important new exhibition examining a little-known aspect of the work of Alan Turing, contributing to the celebrations around the centenary of his birth.
 
‘Alan Turing and Life’s Enigma’ is about Turing’s least-known and final work. This was an exploration into how living things develop their shape and structure from simple balls of cells, a subject called morphogenesis. The exhibition combines Turing’s own notes with objects from the museum collection and is inspired by 1950s design.

As a young mathematician in Cambridge, Turing helped pave the way for the development of the computer as we know it. During the Second World War he worked at Bletchley Park and helped to crack the Enigma code used by German military forces. After the war he worked on the development of computers. He came to the University of Manchester in 1948 where the world’s first working electronic stored-program computer, the ‘Baby’, had just been built.
 
From 1951-54, Turing used the more advanced Ferranti Mark 1 computer to explore morphogenesis. He presented his main ideas on this in an incredible article published in 1952, when he suggested that everything from the spots and stripes on animal furs to the arrangement of pine cones and flowers could be explained by the interactions between two chemicals, how complexity could arise from simplicity. The full impact of Turing’s amazing insight continues to generate debate among scientists today.
 
Turing’s brilliance was recognised during his lifetime but he was a gay man at a time when same-sex relationships between men were illegal in Britain. In 1952 he and another man were convicted of gross indecency. As part of his sentence, Turing had to undertake a year-long ‘treatment’ of female sex hormones. Ironically, Turing was studying the effects of chemicals on development at the same time as the law was forcing him to use chemicals to change his own body. A year after the treatments ended, Turing was found dead at his home in Wilmslow. He had been poisoned by cyanide, apparently taken on an apple.
 
Alan Turing’s genius for thinking differently and approaching problems in new ways changed the world we live in and his ideas continue to be a source of inspiration.
 
Turing has been immortalised on stage and screen in Hugh Whitmore’s Breaking the Code starring Derek Jacobi. In 2001 a permanent memorial to him was unveiled in Manchester’s Sackville Park.
In his centenary year, Turing’s plight recently hit the headlines again when Manchester Withington’s MP John Leech submitted an Early Day Motion urging people to sign an online petition lodged by William Jones protesting about Turing’s conviction and asking for a posthumous pardon. His story stands for that of thousands of men whose lives were damaged by laws based on intolerance.
Nick Merriman Director of The Manchester Museum said, “Alan Turing and Life’s Enigma is an intriguing and surprising look at Turing’s work, an important part of the celebrations which are taking place nationally to mark his centenary.  Turing produced a body of controversial work right here on Oxford Road, literally next door to where the exhibition takes place and we are proud to be honoring him with this exciting exhibition.”
Ends
 
For further information contact Shelagh Bourke on 07971 819 016,
she@we-r-lethal.com

For more information on The Manchester Museum visit http://www.museum.manchester.ac.uk/whatson/exhibitions/alanturingandlifesenigma/

Published: 16-Mar-2012: (1183)