This is orthogonal to the reproducibility crisis, but not really part of it. When you claim a breakthrough even just within a sub-field, if you simply invented

This is orthogonal to the reproducibility crisis, but not really part of it. When you claim a breakthrough even just within a sub-field, if you simply invented an elaborate lie, it's always gonna be caught it's just a waste of everyone's time in the end. This person is lucky she and her lab caught it themselves before other people started to work further on it. And I guess the other lab members were already trying to reproduce it, as you would. That guy who faked all this can't really be thought of as a sophisticated bad actor, neither was he really gaming the system because it never would have worked. He was just leaping into his own pit. Research needs to first move to being fully open access and end of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars going to journals. This is something tangible you can legislate. Then, you need to incentivize high-quality research; that's not easy to do at all, but you can do things if you have hiring power within your field I guess...