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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机译：当哈雷麦卡德姆有几年的时候，他成为了一名生物学家。他为AT＆T's Bell Laboratories的一个系统工程师度过了二十年的工作生活，并在Sunnyvale，加利福尼亚州的洛克希德导弹和空间，研究了军事卫星的数据系统架构。然而，1994年，他参加了斯坦福大学的生物研讨会，他的妻子露西夏皮罗是发展生物学部的主席。 McAdams在听着一个杰出的遗传学中，描述了一个杰出的遗传学家描述了在酵母中转动基因的复杂生物电路。对于未实施的，该系统的图表模糊地让人想起了一盘意大利面，有各种箭头和停止，并附上标志。对于McAdams而言，它看起来只不过是电路，具有各种反馈回路和监管和控制机制，构成了他的系统工程工作的肉类和土豆。
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