> I'll wait for more information before making such strong claims as "obvious quackery".

IMHO science works the other way round.

Skepticism is essential in science. Gut-feelings based on newspaper articles have no place there.

gut feelings have a huge place in discovery science (what these scientists are doing). It can lead you in directions that rational cannot. For example, Kekule's dream of ouroborus: " He said that he had discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule after having a reverie or day-dream of a snake seizing its own tail (this is an ancient symbol known as the ouroboros).[14]"

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.

Exactly. Gut feeling is another word for intuition. Such background cognition is a great tool in science and has been found in use by a lot of top scientists and thinkers. Training it by broadening your knowledge and then using skepticism and other science tools to focus your thinking is a great way for finding stuff out.

here's your more information http://blogs.cancer.org/drlen/2019/01/29/a-cure-for-cancer-n... from the deputy chief medical officer of the ACS. The statements made in the blog post are completely correct as modern medicine is done. But you didn't need his blog post to know what the scientists did was unreasonable. In science, you have to back every claim with published data.

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).

The second link was Vinay Prasad. He's not a PhD student, he's one of the most respected cancer researchers alive.

PhD students often hold journal clubs where they evaluate current research (in my phd program in biophysics we covered everything from the publication of the human genome to quantum erasers). I don't think the reactions to these are knee-jerk: based on everything we know about the situation, the claim is unreasonable.