No, but Charles Hackenbrock's thesis work so elegantly supported the hypothesis—that a mechanochemical mechanism coupled electron transport to ATP synthesis—that it was cited almost 600 times as evidence. It earned him speaking invitations all over the US and Europe, and an assistant professorship at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD) straight out of graduate studies. “Everyone,” he says, “fell in love with these ultrastructural changes.”
Hackenbrock, now an emeritus professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, recalls that the project started as a graduate course project to isolate mitochondria from rat livers and test the effects of snake venom on their function. But when he noticed that his control group of mitochondria underwent a dramatic conformational change—from “knotted up” just after isolation to the “beautiful mitochondria” of intact cells—during a sucrose buffer incubation, he immediately switched his thesis to study how this structural change...
