No, in the context in which Marie-Louise Hammarskjöld wrote her statement the "experiment" you mention was totally not scientifically "legitimate" and only for

No, in the context in which Marie-Louise Hammarskjöld wrote her statement the "experiment" you mention was totally not scientifically "legitimate" and only for one not knowing the context can the impression remain that "it appears to be". That is exactly why Marie-Louise Hammarskjöld wrote that. The context is, it was about the preprint on bioRxiv, and the said preprint was totally worthless scientifically, because the authors didn't understand what they write about. Specifically, they aren't the specialists in the field about which they wrote, and they failed to understand that what they believed they did was a totally normal effect of the process they used, that is, a "noise" and not a "signal." To compare with the computer related topics, in that preprint the proof was like when somebody would claim that the nature consists of 8x8 pixel blocks and as a proof claim that they "made photos" and "when made bigger the 8x8 blocks were obvious." All while not mentioning that they actually made JPEG which reduces every image to 8x8 blocks and not knowing that these are just the artifacts of the process used. That is why the real experts criticized the existence of the paper -- exactly because they knew almost every journalist and anybody else will quote the text and use it for scaring people even if all was an obvious nonsense. Unfortunately these "details" weren't stated so clearly in the OP too. Covering the science is not easy. Additionally, the current paper, actually published, was "Contributed by" its author, which allows him to avoid the proper peer review, as explained in wosk's comment here. The author of the article we discuss writes that the published paper contains some additional work, compared to the preprint, but the title of the article is unfortunately certainly too clickbaity, again, in the whole context. "Evidence" gives an impression that the "support" is strong, whereas, again, in the complete context of the preprint and the "contribution" mechanism, it would be surprising if it's that good. That's why one should give much more weight to the Harmit Malik's statement that he "remains unconvinced that the explanation is integrated virus."