Fifty years of operon

In the latest issue of Science, there is a one-page editorial titled "The Birth of the Operon" by François Jacob, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965:

What is the operon, whose 50th anniversary is being celebrated this week? The word heralded the discovery of how genes are turned on and off, and it launched the now-immense field of gene regulation. ... we cannot presume to know how new ideas will arise and where scientific research will lead.

In the next three paragraphs, Jacob provides an insightful and vivid description of his research related to the discovery of the "operon" – a structural gene-regulatory gene ensemble. In consonant with his comment on scientific discovery, he concludes:

Our breakthrough was the result of “night science”: a stumbling, wandering exploration of the natural world that relies on intuition as much as it does on the cold, orderly logic of “day science.” In today’s vastly expanded scientific enterprise, obsessed with impact factors and competition, we will need much more night science to unveil the many mysteries that remain about the workings of organisms.

It is worth noting that the Journal of Molecular Biology (JMB) has recently published a special issue [Volume 409, Issue 1, Pages 1-88 (27 May 2011)], titled "The Operon Model and its Impact on Modern Molecular Biology" with historical accounts and reviews to celebrate operon's 50th anniversary. It is because of this event that motivated me to read the Jacob and Monod 1961 JMB review article "Genetic regulatory mechanisms in the synthesis of proteins" – I have come across this paper so many times before, and should have definitely read it long ago!