I think this is a horrible idea. The average age of R01 has risen to over 40! Why add another 2 years by requiring students to reproduce work that is already pu

I think this is a horrible idea. The average age of R01 has risen to over 40! Why add another 2 years by requiring students to reproduce work that is already published? It adds virtually no value to a graduate degree. The most difficult part of science is creating new hypotheses and designing and executing the experiments to test them. It takes years to learn how to do this as is, without adding on time to use a method you have no interest in, to re-demonstrate an experiment that has already been designed, to test a hypothesis that is already in the literature.