Systems are getting increasingly complex as well. In my lab, it literally takes several weeks for people to learn how to do our assay, and that's with constant feedback from an experienced user. Every step is published but that still doesn't help when things don't go according to plan. Also, not every lab has the same equipment. Even if we provided free training, a lab would still need to drop $300k to get all the machines required, which are not common.

Not every result is worth reproducing either. If someone publishes a paper that shows several lines of evidence for the same thing and they've done all reasonable controls, and it doesn't disagree with any existing models, why would you reproduce that? Outside of deliberate fraud, it's a pretty solid bet that it's true, and you can save enormous amounts of time and money by proceeding to build off of it instead of reproducing it first. And that's really what it comes down to: no one's paying you to do this kind of work. Governments would have to fund it, because you're fundamentally asking for twice as much work to be done, which will cost twice as much money (and time).

But take heart: when someone DOES make an outrageous claim, it's very common for labs to try to reproduce it (or really, disprove it). See [1] and [2] for recent examples.

[1] "STAP stem cell controversy ends in suicide for Japanese scientist" http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-stap-ste... [2] "Water bears’ genetic borrowing questioned" https://www.sciencenews.org/article/water-bears%E2%80%99-gen...