He came up with his idea in collaboration with scientist to study consciousness. It’s not his idea really it’s a group of people’s ideas. His brilliance in his field contributed to the brilliance of other people’s fields. This is how collaborative science works.
If you seen any of Penrose’s talks or read any of his books, you know that this was not fundamentally his idea.
Paraphrasing here: The paper above was looking for energy given off during collapse, (which they did not find) on the Diosi side, where Penrose' idea is more in the retro-causal, you wouldn't find an energy signature. I am sure someone can call out a better representation, but similar to your response that Roger has these ideas and looks for collaborators, but still has his own ideas on things that may differ.
Interesting seeing this conversation going on, Roger / Stuarts work has been trashed over the years, Max Tegmark did the maths and said brain is too wet/warm for any quantum stuff, but we've been finding this in tubulin* and other places, never retracted the paper.
Either way, consciousness is amazing, and a mystery, anyone interested should come to Tucson in April for Towards a science of Consciousness, good conversations, interesting people, usually more questions than answers.
Finding isolated quantum effects is emphatically unsurprising: after all, everything is quantum. It's just limited in locality, which is basically what Tegmark is talking about (locality and decoherence time being somewhat dual).
There is no evidence for the kind of quantum effects that would involve multiple neurons. This is quite a block, since afaik, even the quantum-woo types (Penrose, emphatically) are not claiming that consciousness comes from the quantum behavior of a single neuron. (And that would be profoundly ignorant of basic neuroscience.)
If you seen any of Penrose’s talks or read any of his books, you know that this was not fundamentally his idea.