Maybe he could work with someone else to get it to a publication stage? It's super interesting, and combats a well-known problem that you get a lot more out of publishing positive cases (we found a correlation) vs negative cases (we found no correlation), although they're both valuable knowledge.

Look, I know writing stuff up sucks. But it could be a great opportunity to learn a lot of things from a very knowledgable person. With the right prof, it could be a great undergrad project.