Your argument may be too strong - you're suggesting that big companies or the professional class of responsible people always does things better. But HN is founded on many examples of that not being true.

i.e. if your argument applies word for word against Semmelweis (who advocated hand-washing) or doubters against other earlier amateur vaccines, it it will fall victim to what we now know about those older cases, when the at-the-time experts were wrong.

In this case I wouldn't say that the reason this kind of research is valuable is anything related to medicine per se - but more that it can show the value of the much lower liability level he operates in, and how it means that amateurs can make massive cuts in preparing and defending from lawsuits. Example: if a company realized that only food-quality ingredients were required, not lab-quality, would it be worth it for them to justify that to the FDA and spend millions on it? probably not. My hypothesis for what's going on in general in medicine is this effect times a thousand, at every stage of development.