To be fair, this autoconversion of text into dates is a known feature of Excel (and some open source equivalents) and has been for some years – whether or not it is desirable or useful depends on the incoming date (even valid dates/times can be mangled if they get inadvertantly converted to American format when you are in a European country).
It can be prevented in various ways (by ensuring the column is treated as raw text and not autoformatted into anything else) and is not Microsofts fault – as one the profs himself points out Excel is not always the best tool for scientific analysis (I would have thought something like scilab or matlab might be better; and that people who are much smarter than myself to do this kind of research and presumably are in top science Universities should surely have access to better IT resources?)
Microsoft Excel blamed for gene study errors – BBC News
