It's also worth remembering that a cell isn't a well structured environment - it's essentially a bag of chemicals, with some slightly smaller bags of other chem

It's also worth remembering that a cell isn't a well structured environment - it's essentially a bag of chemicals, with some slightly smaller bags of other chemicals inside it. While there's a lot of mechanisms which are adding order and structure to what happens, it's all still just a big concentrated aqueous solution of everything in the cell, diffusion processes and mixing and all. So statements like a gene being "switched on" are very much an abstraction: whereas switching on a data line in a chip puts a very nice neat little voltage potential somewhere, switching on a gene basically just means the concentration of some "chemical" (protein) starts increasing and getting mixed into the cell (or ejected out of it by interacting with a bunch of other floating around things).