Decent idea, but unfortunately unconvincing examples.

Mendel has been the subject of controversy regarding whether his results were fraudulent. Hardly a great choice for an exemplar, whatever the truth is.

Linus Pauling (described as an "amateur biologist" in a caption) was hardly an amateur interested in the structure of DNA, having written his PhD on x-ray diffraction. In addition, he is introduced in the text as "Linus Pauli," a Nobel-prize winning physicist. This seems to be a Mendelian cross between Linus Pauling, the Nobel-prize winning chemist, and Wolfgang Pauli, the Nobel-prize winning physicist.

Francis Crick, who made the title as an example of the power of amateurs, was pursuing a PhD in the field of x-ray crystallography, which sort of disqualifies him an "amateur" in my mind. Those "careful biology experiments" were studies of x-ray diffraction images of DNA, making Crick's physics background entirely relevant.

This is an oddly structured argument, which collapses upon itself based on the examples the author chose-and the vocabulary he uses to segment them.

An amateur does a thing because they love it, while a professional does it because they are paid to do so. Once an amateur is paid, they become professional.

Perhaps this would be more compelling if the author segmented his examples based on whether they were members of the scientific establishment, or of the scientific avant garde instead.

Crick was a professional scientist i.e., that's how he earned his living.

The power of the expert is to limit public access to knowledge and scare amateurs of, thus raising his value by means of artificial scarcity.

And that is how it worked in the past. Todays problem is, that to become a expert, one has to sacrifice years of life, just to gather all knowledge necessary to understand and contribute to a field. Thus barriers are not only no longer needed, the sheer mass of knowledge works as a paywall against amateurs. This ocassionally lowers, when a completely new field is discovered, but in general this principle holds.

To allow amateurs to contribute something usefull again, they would have to study in there spare time, spend a lot of time on the subject - in there free time and then they- will become experts without titles. Thank you for those, internet.