Feedback loops and other control structures are endemic in biochemical pathways. In the majority of cases we have little understanding of how they contribute to the fitness of an organism. For example, glycolysis which is arguably the most understood biochemical pathway, has over ten regulatory loops that modulate its behavior. In general the exact role for this extreme regulation is poorly understood. In this talk I will cover three topics: 1) An introduction to what tools and theory we already have to understand pathway design together with examples of biochemical control strategies; 2) A novel approach to tracking and quantifying perturbations through a pathway, and 3) A discussion of a number of major issues that remain, notably: control of signaling networks, the role of stochasticity in control and regulation, and effective means to experimentally characterize the control characteristics of networks.