@BunsenBurner Don’t all cons tell themselves that they are just buying time?
I wasn’t a victim. Luckily I read about it in the NY Times like everyone else. She is a total fraud. I don’t believe it was a conspiracy. Silicon Valley and early stage biotech work that way. She got into the wrong side of the business where results are shorter term and more transparent. If she had stayed in school and gotten a few more years in the industry she might have been able to play the startup game much more effectively.
From what I understood from reading the book, Elizabeth didn’t fool anyone who understood even a little bit about blood testing technology and techniques. She purposely stayed far away from anyone who actually had the knowledge to accurately assess her claims. People who work in this field have said repeatedly that even hearing about her claims and aspirations from afar, they knew she was full of it and couldn’t understand how anyone with a brain or ability to research her claims on even a superficial level could fall for it.
Reading “Bad Blood” now. It’s excellent and I highly recommend it. I agree with @Nrdsb4 - the science folks were skeptical. The finance folks were thrilled at the idea of a new technology they could sell and, for a while, just wanted it to be true.
h didn’t fool anyone who understood even a little bit about blood testing technology and techniques<<<<<<
Right, so the way the money flowed makes no sense. There has to be some criminal element that is far darker than being hoodwinked by a kid with an idea.
I don’t necessarily agree. I think the fact that the actual financial investors didn’t understand the science was what made it all possible. That’s where her manipulative abilities and charisma came into the picture. Take people who just don’t know any better and don’t have the time and inclination to educate themselves, add a whole lot of persuasive ability in the form of an Elizabeth Holmes, and you now have a sucker.
Not to mention that she and Sonny actually lied and manipulated the demonstrations and other data. Some people actually came to see the labs and have tests done on their own blood. How were they to know that behind the scenes the results were being cooked or that the labs were fake?
ETA: John Carreyrou makes much of the fact that in Big Tech, “fake it til you make it” is commonplace. The actual technology usually eventually catches up to the hype. But what most people lost sight of is that this was not just about a cool app or other kind of benign technology. This is NOT the way is should work with medical technology. You can kill people with that kind of practice.
Question: I don’t have HBO. Can I make a one time purchase of the HBO documentary ( The Inventor: Out For Blood in Silicon Valley), coming out March 18?
Word on the biotech street is that because of Theranos, medical diagnostics fell out of favor of VCs… huge setback to the industry as a whole. EH needs to rot in hell.
@Nrdsb4: Where I live, one can sign up for HBO for just a day or two. Sign up for it via telephone, then cancel it two days later. They’ll pro-rate the fee.
Lots of tech and biotech investors just follow the gravity of money. It’s all about the elevator speech. That’s not a conspiracy. It is the way tech financing often works. Holmes saw that gravity and used it.
Like many have said, if she would have stuck to something slightly less consequential she’d still be a millionaire now. She could have used the startup money to buy something that actually worked and marketed it like everyone else in biotech does.
But no. She had to lie about something really specific. Stupid.
Again, it is the bigger players I wonder about. I can’t see the big pharma companies as being victims here. Nor the VCs. They all thought they were in something that was going to make shed loads of money. Her basic idea was something Mr Spock would whip out on a 1970s Star Trek. She raised money on that basis? It isn’t because she was pretty or charming, because it seems she was neither.
$1.4B p’d away. $1.4B!!! Mostly from private, unsophisticated investors. Google Ventures passed up the opportunity to invest because there were questions about the technology that were not answered (and no audited financial statements, apparently).
I missed this story when it initially broke but the podcast The Dropout was suggested to me by a friend and I’ve been captivated. I’m almost done with book and would suggest it to anyone who loves intrigue. She is a sociopath and I wonder if all the publicity of late due to the documentary and podcasts will make it more difficult for it to escape criminal charges.
She really does belong in jail, but with our country’s history of rich, powerful people avoiding prison, I’m not holding my breath. Yeah, a few like Martha Stewart find themselves there, but relative to the numbers of wealthy connected people committing crimes, it’s an extremely rare event. Being a young, relatively attractive female with friends in very high places, I just don’t see it. But I would LOVE to be wrong. She’s horrible.
"Again, it is the bigger players I wonder about. I can’t see the big pharma companies as being victims here. "
Big pharma (GSK and Pfizer; note - Walgreens is NOT pharma) might have had some initial exploratory relationships with Theranos but bailed out quickly. This is not uncommon.
“Oh my. I bought the finger stick blood test hook, line, and sinker. I mean, it really makes sense. If you can multiply a microscopic particle of DNA, why can’t you do the same for a drop of blood? Just. Wow”
DNA is a really simple molecule. A gene is basically a long word or sentence written with just four letters that are used over and over again. A drop of blood, by contrast, consists of many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of constituents - most of them large and complex proteins. The challenge of “multiplying” a thousand complex proteins is astronomical compared to the PCR expansion of a certain stretch of DNA. I just can’t be done with today’s technology.
But blood analyzers (and there are many) aren’t even trying to expand or multiply the blood. They are trying to find and measure clinically important substances, many of which are in vanishingly low concentrations to begin with. If you further stretch the technology by using just one tiny drop of blood in the first place, there may be only a small number of molecules of substance present to measure, making it impossible for your analyzer to accurately find and measure them. It’s a numbers game - kind of like trying to take an accurate opinion poll by surveying only 5 households. Your chances of error go through the roof.
The way you normally get around that is by drawing and testing more and more blood (or take a bigger sample in your opinion pool), but taking more and ore blood was directly contrary to Theranos’s business model.
Agree with @Scipio and want to add this. Even with DNA, it is not always as simple as sticking a DNA-containing sample into an analyzer and watch it spit out the sequence. That DNA needs to be separated from at least some of those same blood proteins or the machinery that does the PCR amplification or sequencing through a nanopore will gum up. Many companies tried to come up with fully automated PCR machines but few succeeded, and only for some types of samples and tests. I laughed when I saw that some of EH’s patent applications described both DNA and protein-based tests coupled to the analyzer… yeah, it is that simple… I wish so!
I watched the documentary “Drop Out” the other day. One of the professors at Stanford that Elizabeth Holmes came to with her ideas is a medical doctor. She told Elizabeth that her ideas were noble, but completely impractical. Later in the documentary, she verbalizes disgust with the baritone voice Elizabeth was using. She insisted that it was completely fake and that she just laughed the first time she heard her using it.