"So I immediately started thinking about what would happen if you just took thousands of genes and hooked them together at random—what would they do?" Now here was a problem he knew how to think about: he had studied neural circuitry ad nauseam at Oxford. Real genes were pretty complicated, of course. But Jacob and Monod had shown that the regulatory genes, at least, were essentially just switches. And the essence of a switch is that it flips back and forth between two states: active or inactive.
