From Universal Turing Machines to Self-Reproduction*

Abstract Although Turing in his later years became interested in the use of reaction diffusion equations to model morphogenesis (cf. Turing 1952) my task in this essay is to trace the way in which Turing’s notion of the universal computer led to a computational theory of organism growth and reproduction. The focus, then, is on the work in the 1960’s that was spurred by von Neumann’s (1951, 1966) theory of self-reproducing automata. Turing’s result that there exists a universal computing machine suggested to von Neumann that there might be a universal construction machine A, which, when furnished with a suitable description IN of any appropriate automaton N, will construct a copy of N.