 Biological textbooks are replete with famous experiments that are presented as having provided crucial experimental evidence for some hypothesis. To name just a few examples: Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarthy (1944) are reputed to have established DNA as the carrier of hereditary information by a set of ingenious transformation experiments using a bacterium causing lung infection, Pneumococcus. Matthew Meselson and Frank Stahl (1958) conducted an experiment in that is widely thought to have provided evidence that DNA replication is semi-conservative rather than conservative or dissipative (meaning that a newly formed DNA double helix contains one intact strand from the parent molecule and one newly synthesized strand). Ephraim Racker and Walter Stoeckenius (1974) are thought to have provided experimental evidence that settled the long-standing controversy (known as the “oxidative phosphorylation or ox-phos controversy”) as to whether respiration and the generation of the energy-rich compound ATP in mitochondria are coupled through a chemical intermediate or a proton gradient.