The obvious questions is "who's going to do the confirmation work?"
I think that masters/bachelor students should be able to handle that work. A new grant mechanism for masters/bachelor training grants that fund replication would get the job done with a lot of nice side effects.
As a middle american, I'm actually serious when I say this could be a way middle america gets on it's feet again. Being a biomedical researcher at a university hospital, the hospital has proliferated with all types of trainees. What's holding back the basic research side? It's an assembly line in the same way the midwest is familiar, the automobile industry. However, universities aren't good businesses, and what's missing is big pharma companies paying employees fair wages to do this work. Though companies saving the day won't work either because putting people to work we'll mean they won't get sick which is bad for business. So oh well on to the next approach.
The article refers chiefly to repeating mouse or rat experiments.
The obstacle there isn't what level of training researcher has (as long as it's sufficient), but who is going to pay for it.
At the scale proposed (a 6-fold greater number of mice per experiment than is usual) the cost of testing only the core hypothesis is easily over $100K. In addition there is the time involved, which can be from months to years, depending on the experiment.
I don't think they're proposing to scale up to that level, which would indeed result in excessive costs.
Even scaling-up mice experiments would be quite costly, and beyond the size of most research grants. There would have to be new funding mechanisms in place for work like this.
The article proposes that this would be more economical in the long run, and so the NIH et al. should be in its favor. Perhaps they will create a new facility for just such work? Though that seems unlikely in the current funding climate.
Also, the limited supply of researchers and facilities wiling to put up with death threats, breakins, firebombings, being beaten up on the street by groups of masked assailants...
I think that masters/bachelor students should be able to handle that work. A new grant mechanism for masters/bachelor training grants that fund replication would get the job done with a lot of nice side effects.