Sublime

Although a biologist, Monod’s underlying insight was that life is essentially a physical and even mathematical phenomenon.

E. coli has no wires that scientists can pull apart to learn how its circuits work. Instead, they must do experiments of the sort Jacob and Monod carried out. They observe how quickly the bacteria respond to their environment, how quickly they make a certain protein or clear another one away. Scientists combine the results of experiment after exper

No one at the time had a good explanation for how genes in E. coli or its prophages could be quiet one moment and busy the next. Many scientists had assumed that cells simply churned out a steady supply of all their proteins all the time.

Some operons carry several switches, all of which must be thrown for them to make proteins.

It is remarkable that nearly every scientist in genetics research is also engaged in the commerce of biotechnology. There are no detached observers. Everybody has a stake.

A single protein may be able to trigger a cascade of genes, switching on genes for making more switches, allowing E. coli to make hundreds of new kinds of proteins.