When Harley McAdams was a few years shy of 60, he became a biologist. He had spent two decades of his working life as a systems engineer at AT&T's Bell Laboratories, and four years at Lockheed Missile and Space in Sunnyvale, CA, working on data systems architecture for military satellites. In 1994, however, he took to attending biology seminars at Stanford University, where his wife, Lucy Shapiro, was chair of the developmental biology department. McAdams had his epiphany while listening to an eminent geneticist describe the complex biological circuitry that turns genes on and off in yeast. To the uninitiated, the diagram of this system was vaguely reminiscent of a plate of spaghetti, with various arrows and stop and go signs attached. To McAdams, it looked like nothing more than an electric circuit, with the kinds of feedback loops and regulatory and control mechanisms that constituted the meat and potatoes of his systems engineering work.
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