This is fairly common--if work is genuinely original there is likely a good deal of technique involved. There is a lot of laboratory science that is more like craft, and it's always been this way. Reproducibility of novel results should be expected to be poor, and getting to the point of reproduction will often be difficult.
So "failure to reproduce on the first few attempts" does not mean "bad science".
In genomics, however, failure to reproduce was the norm for many years. There were a few spectacularly good early results that held up, but the ubiquitous use of cross-validation (which unless done with insane care is simply invalid) and analysis of significance that was frequently just wrong meant that a lot of results were published that were the numerical equivalents of early Royal Society papers on deformed cows and the like: meticulous descriptions of anomalous one-offs.
A lot of what is happening is generational: the older generation of biological researchers were never trained or equipped with anything like the analytical tools required to cope with the large numerical datasets that labs started generating in the '90's thanks to new technologies in the wake of the Human Genome Project.
So "failure to reproduce on the first few attempts" does not mean "bad science".
In genomics, however, failure to reproduce was the norm for many years. There were a few spectacularly good early results that held up, but the ubiquitous use of cross-validation (which unless done with insane care is simply invalid) and analysis of significance that was frequently just wrong meant that a lot of results were published that were the numerical equivalents of early Royal Society papers on deformed cows and the like: meticulous descriptions of anomalous one-offs.
A lot of what is happening is generational: the older generation of biological researchers were never trained or equipped with anything like the analytical tools required to cope with the large numerical datasets that labs started generating in the '90's thanks to new technologies in the wake of the Human Genome Project.