"We don't go to the doctor and have him or her smell our armpits" is an argument to authority. Just because a doctor doesn't use test X does not mean that test X is not useful. Every single diagnosis test we use today was, at some point in the past, unknown and unused by doctors. It is scientific research which gave us those tests. And, because you seem to be uninformed about the subject, I'd like to tell you that there are a number of things that a doctor will smell when they diagnose you. Famously, you can diagnose phenylketonuria by smell, and you can also diagnose diabetes by smell.

This comment also seems to reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of the scientific process. The whole point of scientific research--which requires funding, usually--is to figure out if a hypothesis is true or false. If you already know whether your hypothesis is true or false, you're not doing research, you're replicating results.

When you do preliminary research, it's because you don't have very good information about some particular subject. You're complaining about the shaky ground that they base their research funding on--but these scientists did the right thing. Because the hypothesis seemed improbable, they conducted a dirt cheap experiment. It's an experiment that you could have conducted yourself for $20.