In most cases you have to justify your research already in the form of grant proposals. If we're already vetting the quality of hypotheses, why not rely on that

In most cases you have to justify your research already in the form of grant proposals. If we're already vetting the quality of hypotheses, why not rely on that process to support the value of the experiment? Further, I don't have any reason to believe the second is a bad hypothesis because I'm not an oncologist. If an oncologist put forth that hypothesis, I'd expect other oncologists to respond. I wouldn't dismiss it outright. I'd wait to see if it made it through the natural filtering system that is academia. If the results somehow bubbled up through that system, I'd expect them to be somehow meaningful to me. I just feel there's a lack of internal support for academia's own systems, and it's creating a lot of doubled-or-worse work for new scientists.