Knee-jerk reactions of Ph.D. students aren't really more convincing than the original article.
I'll wait for more information before making such strong claims as "obvious quackery".
IMHO science works the other way round.
I've been privileged to know a lot of world-class scientists, and many of them have told me their careers and their best ideas came from gut feelings. Of course, they had to apply skepticism to the experimental results of their gut feeling experiments.
Note that now the scientists are claiming they can't afford to publish their research. But running a lab to do cancer research costs much more than publishing (even publishing in a top-tier journal is less than $10K, rent on a lab and salaries are more than $10K/MONTH).