Back in the day I had a physics professor who sometimes complained about his inability to reproduce certain published physics experiments - the kind you could do in a small lab and on a limited budget. (We're not talking "Big Physics" here.) Well, the guy wasn't particularly well-liked for a variety of reasons, so we all tended to just chalk this up to probable incompetence on his part. Knowing what I know now, though, I might be more inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt here - that in fact these experiments were just not reproducible, at least not as described in the literature.