The guy who postulated and validated the way that the mitochondrion operates was...

pvnick · on April 23, 2014

Everybody: "All these ATPs must be coming from something very similar to glycolysis."

Peter Mitchell: "Guys, I think the concentration gradient is responsible"

Everyone: "Shut up Peter"

Later, as Peter was accepting his Nobel prize for discovering one of the most most important biochemical processes, he got to say "I told you so."

I didn't realize he had to secure funding from an outside institution though, that's really interesting. Thanks for that TIL moment.

dekhn · on April 23, 2014

To be honest I doubt I would have believed him at the time given the context. It's a pretty complicated theory that requires a subtle understanding of biophysics.

Remember the reception to the Avery/McCloud experiment- people still insisted protein was the heritable molecule. People simply couldn't understand how a "simple" polymer like DNA could encode information. it was a real mind-bender because (AFAICT) nobody really appreciated how nonuniform polymers could code for information.

Or the reception to the discovery of enzymatic RNA. How could RNA possibly be enzymatic? Well, now we know that RNA runs the game and protein is just muscle.