"All of molecular biology and cloning was done without one single darn statistician. do you really think the people who cloned the insulin gene actually repeated the experiment 10 times and got a mean and standard deviation?"
gak! you should talk to my sister sometime, and she'll tell you the headaches of having results published in a reputable journal. but the simple answer is, duh, yes.
actually, ironically, the example you cite is especially relevant: cloning and gene splicing and all of the tools that a molecular bioligist uses to manipulate genes are inherently statistical in nature. (you're applying something to a huge mass of bacteria or viruses and want to figure out how effective the process is, how often it worked/failed, where it worked and so forth). a molecular biologist who is not also trained as a statistician is merely a lab technician.
