Among the literature addressing the topic of cross-disciplinary circulation of concepts, studies in the history of cybernetics have become numerous. Interdisciplinary profiles, meetings and collaborations have been under growing scrutiny, whether at the scale of individuals, small groups or whole national or transnational contexts. However, it remains not so clear what the scientific outcome of such conceptual circulations is. There is no homogeneous picture of the epistemological contribution and the value of results brought by cybernetic concepts (thus some authors both state that cybernetics invaded whole fields of knowledge, but was a failure at the same time). Several factors may account for this blurred situation. On the one hand, attention was devoted mainly to a micro-historical prosopography of initiators (as with the conferences for cybernetics held by the Macy Fundation between 1945 and 1953), with insufficient focus on larger-scale, longer-term downstream disciplinary integration. On the other hand, approaches from cultural studies of science have based their analysis on actors’ discourse rather than practices. Such approaches view conceptual transfers as metaphors or lexical transfers, that is, as linguistic processes. While they worked on fruitful historical contexts where discourse and practices overlap, the case of France does not fit this picture. France after the Libération turned out to be a kind of “no man’s land” for cybernetic modelling. Fascination of the general public contrasted with the lack of actual investment in scientific collaborations. It turned out that everybody would talk about cybernetics, but nobody would get involved in actual cross-disciplinary modelling practices. Hence a culturalist approach does not properly account for whether and how concepts are put at work (or not). For example, it does not address appropriately the question why, while concepts were available immediately after the War, it took them about five decades to be fully integrated as an operational cornerstone in the modelization of biomolecular pathways. This example will be illustrated from the first introductions of the feedback-control concept in biochemistry to the actual state of systems biology.