There is a big piece of missing context in these studies -- the significance of the results that could not be reproduced. The fact that mammalian genes are lon

There is a big piece of missing context in these studies -- the significance of the results that could not be reproduced. The fact that mammalian genes are longer than the mRNA they encode (on average by a factor of 5 or so, and sometimes by a factor of 100 or more) was a paradigm shift, and we know that it is true, not because the original experiments have been reproduced, but because in the past 40 years, the observation has been confirmed millions of times (20,000 times per mammalian genome). Likewise, we just keep getting more and more data supporting common ancestry of genes (and organisms). It is important to remember that the "median" paper is cited less than 5 times, which means that there may be a large fraction of results that cannot be reproduced, but also have had little effect on science. There have also been highly cited papers that could not be reproduced but whose results were correct (break through experiments can be hard to reproduce), and there are highly cited papers that were simply wrong. But it is hard to measure these phenomena in an un-biased way. The exact reproducibility of a paper is certainly important, but science is much more about building on results than reproducing experiments.