A graduate of the wartime MIT Radiation Laboratory, Sayre was now at Oxford studying molecular biology with Dorothy Hodgkin.
塞尔在战争时期，毕业于麻省理工学院放射实验室，现在在牛津大学，师从多罗西·霍奇金，学习分子生物学。
Having worked with F.C. Williams during the war, he made a visit to Manchester to see the computer, explaining that it might help in X-ray crystallography, Williams passed him on to Alan.
战时他曾与威廉姆斯一起工作，并去曼彻斯特参观那台计算机，他认为这有助于X射线结晶学的研究，于是威廉姆斯把他介绍给了图灵。
who showed an unusual kindness and geniality, making Sayre 'perfectly at ease with him'.
图灵对他表现出了不同寻常的友好和亲切，塞尔感觉“和他在一起非常轻松”。
They talked for two and a half days, interrupted only when 'the telephone would ring to say that the machine was free for a few minutes in case he wanted to use it.
他们马不停蹄地聊了两天半，其中的间断只有当“有人打电话告诉他，如果要用机器，这几分钟可以用。
And he would gather up sheaves of paper and ribbons of punched paper tapes...and disappear for a bit.'
然后他就会抓起一捆纸和几条打孔纸带……离开几分钟。”
David Sayre was able to guess that Alan had worked on cryptological problems during the war.
塞尔猜到了图灵在战时研究过密码学。
The point was that X-ray crystallography, which was now being applied to the problem of determining the structure of proteins, was remarkably similar in nature to cryptanalysis.
X射线结晶学现在用于研究蛋白质的结构，其本质上与密码分析学非常相似。
The X-rays would leave a diffraction pattern, which could be regarded as the encipherment of the molecular structure.
X射线的衍射结果，可以看成是分子结构的密文。
Performing the decipherment process was closely analogous to the problem of finding both plain-text and key, given the cipher-text alone.
而其分析过程，可以看成是给定密文，求解明文和密钥注。
The result of this analogy was that... Before we finished he had re-invented by himself most of the methods which crystallographers, up to that time, had worked out.
因为这种相似性，所以……他把结晶学家目前为止发明出来的大部分方法，全部重新独立地发明了一遍。
He had, for this purpose, a breadth of knowledge greatly surpassing that of any crystallographer I have known, and I am confident that he would have advanced the crystallographic situation very decidedly if he had worked in it seriously for a time.
他在这方面的知识之精深，远远超过了我知道的任何一位结晶学家，假如他在这个领域认真研究一段时间，我保证他一定会推动结晶学的发展。
As it was, he may have had hold of one line which in 1949 had not yet appeared in crystallography, concerned with establishing quantitatively how much information it is necessary to have on hand at the outset of a search for a solution to ensure that a solution can be found.
他想到了一个结晶学界在1949年根本没想过的问题，即量化地计算，必须掌握多少信息量，才能确保得到一个解。