"enormous" = "extremely significant"?

[Joel S. Berson]

Ryoji Noyori, a Nobel laureate in chemistry and president of the
Riken Center for Developmental Biology, where the
currently-under-question research that reported a "simple acid bath"
could turn body cells into stem cells was conducted, is quoted by the
NYTimes as saying "An inexperienced researcher collected enormous
data, and her handling of it was extremely careless."

I don't know whether this is a translation from Japanese (the author
of the NYT article  is Japanese) or Noyori spoke in English.  In
either case --  Does "enormous data" mean "extremely
significant"?  Or "an extremely large amount" of it?  (The latter
would strike me as incorrect -- the experimental data collected
surely was not on the scale of subatomic particle collisions.  And
I'd expect the phrasing "enormous amount of data".)

Joel

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