All scientists start out without a PhD. Then, they do some research. At some point, they either have published enough novel papers or have done a single piece o

All scientists start out without a PhD. Then, they do some research. At some point, they either have published enough novel papers or have done a single piece of novel work that advances the art and warrants granting of a PhD. If these students truly are primary authors on major papers in serious peer-reviewed journals, I predict that this lab will end up with some sort of joint academic agreement with a local university so that the ceremonial stapling of bio papers and minting of PhDs can be done. The rest of graduate school (classes, a master's thesis, etc.) is just scaffolding to acclimate you to doing research. If you can skip all of that and jump right in, nicely done! But, of those 500 kids mentioned in the Nature article, I predict many do not do top-quality published research. I would even bet their success rate (measured as "people who graduate from just running experiments other people designed") will be lower than that of a traditional PhD-granting institution, were I a betting man. The scaffolding is expensive, but is there for a reason beyond just tradition.