Every piece of writing has a purpose and a target audience.

The purpose of the primary literature is to advance the field, and the target is the field. It's for peer reviewers to understand what you did well enough to decide whether they believe you, whether you eliminated alternate explanations, whether you're right in contradicting what so-and-so found earlier. It's for other scientists to understand whether what you did supports the conclusions you draw. And it's for other scientists to be able to repeat and build on your results.

This means that these articles have to be incredibly detailed and use very precise language. Cell types (and where they came from or how they were made), genes (which version? which version of which version? under the native promoter? terminator? 3' untranslated region?), media, conditions, statistical tests, program inputs and outputs, and on, and on, are critical to evaluating the quality and the scope of findings.

This means jargon, abbreviation, and "codes," some of which are so well known by people in the field that they are no longer worth the space it takes to define them. There are single jargon terms that would take me a paragraph to describe to my mother, and I might use four of them in a sentence to make it clear exactly what I did. Writing all this out would not advance the purpose of the publication. It would make it harder and make it take longer for the actual target audience to read it, and their time is scarce and also funded by your tax dollars. It would waste my time, and I've already worked at least 55 hours this week despite it being Thursday afternoon. It would, moreover, prevent anyone from publishing my paper.

I don't read research articles on economics or linguistics and complain that they don't define terms that every first year PhD student knows. If you want something written for a different audience, read something written for a different audience. Read a literature review--scientists in the field write them for a more general audience, and the same major journals that publish primary literature also publish reviews. Instead of reading the new cover article, read the perspective article written by another scientist in the field to put the findings in context. Read the journal's news section. Read a professional society's popular section. Read a pop science magazine. Hell, insist that these things be of high quality. Don't complain that a form of writing meant to perform a specific job doesn't do five other jobs too.