Professor Jamie Davies works in the Physiology department at the University of Edinburgh. Embryologists have classically approached the ideas in Turing’s “The chemical basis of morphogenesis” in two ways: (a) they have modelled embryos in silico to see if Turing patterning could make a particular pattern in principle; and (b) they have sought evidence, from gene expression patterns and knockout phenotypes, for Turing patterning in vivo. We are taking a third approach, effectively a hybrid of the other two and of synthetic biology: we seek to assemble a synthetic Turing patterning system in cultures of living cells. Here, we will present our design, how it behaves in models, and will describe the state of our construction at the time of the meeting. The Turing Research Symposium was organised by the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics in partnership with SICSA and supported by Cambridge University Press.