 Both in the early and later developments of molecular biology, microbes functioned in many respects as general molecular models for biological insight and technological development. The very fact that microbes can play this stand-in role for life in general drove many successes in the field. However, it might be a concern that microbes are useful only for what they tell researchers about microbial life, and that the knowledge generated by microbiological investigations will always be restricted to aspects of microbial biology. For instance, gene regulation in the form of operons (modules of genes treated as genetic regulatory units) was discovered in the bacterium E. coli, as well as in one of their viruses, in the 1950s (Jacob &amp; Monod 1961). But although there are now known to be many important differences between bacterial and eukaryotic gene regulation, and different modes of gene regulation within just bacteria (Beckwith 2011), the E. coli operon model launched a whole field of investigation driven by general expectations about how gene expression could be effectively controlled (Brenner et al. 1990). Ultimately, eukaryotic gene regulation had to be studied in tractable multicellular organisms in order to ascertain the additional complexities and differences of eukaryote gene regulation from the bacterial model.