Did anyone here actually use Theranos “lab” services? Were you told when the truth came out? Who knew first, you or your doctor? I never used it or heard of it.
I never used it but I certainly heard of it. If it had worked, it would have been amazing.
The premise of its fake tecnology was that it could perform all the complicated blood tests from just a finger-stick of blood.
Sadly, it turned out to be a giant hoax.
I thought the idea of it was brilliant. Amazing how she conned so many major people.
And it was the young bio majors working in the lab who knew something was wrong from the beginning.
The idea was fascinating but we had all our lab work done at labs approved by our insurer with a long track record. We are happy insurer generally pays 100% of lab work so never wanted to derail that benefit by going to an out of network lab.
I had heard of it but was never sure if the test was actually used at a real lab.
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Read the book Bad Blood. If any of your kiddos are working in biotech, it is a MUST read for them. I bought several copies and gave to my friends. A fascinating read.
I believe that Elizabeth Holmes was not a garden variety fraud - she genuinely believed that her idea can be implemented and the fraudulent activity was simply the means to buy some time with the investors so the instrument could be finally developed. Of course, that does not legitimize fraud.
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No, she was not a garden variety fraud. She was a sociopath who took millions and millions of dollars from investors, fully knowing the whole company was built on a lie.
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I was skeptical of her idea from the outset and never really believed her concept would work. I know nothing about Holmes’ beliefs or her intent, but it does seem to me that she had to know her company was built on a lie. And how could she keep on lying to investors and to the press? Did she not know she was going to get caught?
60 Minutes did a story on her last night. Some of her employees said that she was a pathological liar.
So much money went into that company! She was featured so often. It never made sense to me how she could do with a simple blood drop what everyone else needed many vials of blood to do. Sad to think of the many lives and careers derailed.
She was not just a pathological liar; she likely has this narcissistic personality like some people I ran into a few times in my biotech career. You know the type… my ideas are so great and revolutionary that they must be implemented, and because I am so smart and fabulous, they must work. Like the CSO of one company throwing testing results in the trash can and yelling at the head of bio group that they should never show him such garbage… because he knew the compounds were active, it was all the biologists’ fault that they were not showing any activity. Or a few others.
EH harmed patients in more than one way. Her actions caused a lot of damage to legitimate biotech and medical device startups that will be struggling to raise funds because the Theranos fiasco made the investors super cautious. Also, patents issued on Theranos vaporware could cause a lot of problems down the road for other inventors…
The book Bad Blood written by the WSJ reporter who exposed her vaporware fraud reads like fascinating fiction. Sadly, it is not.
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I work in the biotech business developing new lab tests, so I started hearing about Elizabeth Holmes and her company pretty early on. At first I thought maybe they had some new space-age technology that no one else knew about. But I questioned how a 19 year old college dropout with 3 semesters at Stanford under her belt could come up with something so new and so wonderful that no one else had even heard of it, much less actually put it into practice… But who knows? There is such a thing as true genius.
But a little later I heard statements from her and the company that they didn’t really have any new technology - that their device was simply a miniaturization of existing lab test technology. That’s when I knew they would never make it. It’s hard enough to accurately measure one or two, or at a stretch three, substances at once in a tiny drop of blood. But to measure 70 all at once from the same drop of blood was beyond absurd. Maybe Dr. McCoy on the Starship Enterprise can do that but we can’t - not in this century.
What never occurred to me at the time was that Theranos would engage in flagrant fraud to try to keep from failing. When doing a live demo of your technology in front of customers or investors, it’s common to “put your best foot forward” - to arrange conditions and carefully choose which instruments you use and which tests you run to maximize your chances of success. But to shamelessly dry-lab the whole thing and put out totally bogus results represents a level of dishonesty I would never have dreamed that even my most-hated competitors were capable of.
Apart from her criminal dishonesty, Holmes’s big mistake was trying to apply Silicon Valley business practices and ethics to healthcare. The “fake it until you make it” mantra might work okay when the only downside to your failure is annoying some customers by putting out a bug-ridden app that doesn’t work very well. But when people’s healthcare and possibly lives are dependent on the output of your device, that output better be real and better be accurate - first time out of the box.
In 2016 I saw Elizabeth Homes speak at the AACC national conference in Philadelphia. She was a plenary speaker in the main ballroom. A short clip of this session was shown on the 60 Minutes piece last night . By this time serious cracks had started to appear in the Theranos dream, but it had not yet collapsed. Most of the attendees at the conference (theoretically her “colleagues,” although she did not deserve to have that term applied to her) were by this time very suspicious of the whole story. In the main ballroom she was treated with respect tinged with quiet skepticism. But in the overflow room where I was sitting and watching on closed circuit TV, she was openly mocked and taunted. She was denounced a charlatan who had stained an honorable industry and endangered people’s lives. This year at the AACC meeting in Chicago one of the feted speakers was John Carryou, the WSJ investigative reporter who had brought her down. He got a standing ovation.
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“Apart from her criminal dishonesty, Holmes’s big mistake was trying to apply Silicon Valley business practices and ethics to healthcare. The “fake it until you make it” mantra might work okay when the only downside to your failure is annoying some customers by putting out a bug-ridden app that doesn’t work very well. But when people’s healthcare and possibly lives are dependent on the output of your device, that output better be real and better be accurate - first time out of the box.”
This. I have friends in the medical device and diagnostics business and periodically hear their rants about how the newly hired management coming from semiconductor and software industry wants to run their biotech companies the way they used to do it in their previous places. There is also a lot of hot air-filled talk about “disruption” of the FDA and the regulated industry, never mind the regulations were put in place to protect the public from such snake oils.
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As a result of this thread, I bought the audio book “Bad Blood” referenced by @BunsenBurner above. I listened to it for a few hours today as I did quite a bit of driving. WOW. This woman does indeed sound like someone with sociopathic tendancies. And I read today that even after all she has been accused of, she is actively seeking out investors for some new projects.
Wow! @Nrdsb4 - she needs to be in a white collar prison with the likes of Shkreli and Madoff. Her buddy Sunny, too.
Why is she still free to victimize others?
@Himom said:
As I understand it, Holmes is under indictment, but of course at present is presumed innocent until proven guilty. According to the terms of her settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, she is legally barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company for ten years. But nothing keeps her from serving as an officer or director of a private company, so she is free to solicit investor support for any private endeavors. Anyone who would invest with her at this point seems very foolish imo. Even if she were to come up with a legitimate product this time, she has shown herself to be a liar, greedy, a terrible manager, and not remotely trustworthy in a position of power and influence.
https://www.businessinsider.com/theranos-founder-elizabeth-holmes-new-startup-report-2018-6
I’ve read some blurbs, however, that state that the word is that it’s not inconceivable that Holmes could obtain financing in Silicon Valley because, according to author John Carreyou, “there’s certainly a lot of innovation there, but there’s also an unbelievable amount of arrogance and pretending.”
Okay, I’m now more than halfway through the Bad Blood book. @BunsenBurner is correct; this woman (and her second in command/boyfriend) not only perpetuated a giant fraud, but were vicious in their tactics to intimidate and silence employees who realized what was going on and tried to do something about it. They fired so many people when these employees voiced concerns about the serious problems with the technology and told them that they “had” to sign NDAs as a condition of termination (really?). Bulwani even called the police on a person who refused to sign the NDA, telling the police that this person was stealing Theranos property. When the policeman who responded to the call asked what property was taken, he responded “property that is in his head.” They used their lawyers to bully and threaten not only employees, but even patients who complained about the problems with the lab results. It’s almost unbelievable what they did and more than that, how long they got away with it.
What I found really interesting is how, even though he had invested $125 million in Theranos, Rupert Murdoch refused to intervene with the WSJ articles when confronted numerous times by Elizabeth Holmes about it. I find that rather surprising, given his general reputation.
The author of Bad Blood stops just short of calling Elizabeth Holmes a sociopath, but her actions certainly make one wonder if she does in fact meet that diagnosis.
This book is fascinating.
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