” Like so many others, I had confirmation bias, wanting this young, ambitious woman with a great idea to succeed.”
“Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli paid back EVERY DIME. His investors lost nothing, but he still got 7 years in prison.
Any bets on how long she’ll serve?
It seems like the overall concept was valid, but Theranos needed a lot of work to improve accuracy.
They shouldn’t have been afraid to announce their failings - in a zero interest rate, printed money monetary system as we have, big investors are very forgiving about bad results in new technology.
I’ve had some involvement with microfluidics, fascinating technology that offers great potential. But that said, the devil is as always, in the millions of details and engineers always see the potential rather than the limitations. But executives are supposed to balance that, not enable cheating to hide failures and deceive investors and others. Her big brain was the problem here, not the technology, and most likely the investors would have stayed in for the long term had she not lied and cheated.
This story is about a lot of things, but one of them is widespread scientific illiteracy among people with very high-level “educations”.
Now, I don’t count, as a biology major and medical school graduate. I never took an interest in Theranos as it was rising, since the fraud was so transparent.
But. When I was in (public) high school and in (liberal arts) college, EVERYBODY had to take a few science courses, and EVERYBODY had enough math to do simple logic problems.
Some really big people with really big degrees backed this nonsense, because (apparently) they couldn’t tell it was as impossible as spinning straw into gold.
Shes another silicon valley grifter scammer. Btw, Mattis was on her board of directors. No doubt because of his medical lab background. /s
Therenos was a modern-day remake of a 1969 episode of Hawaii Five-0.
No kidding, even down to the machine that diagnosed from a drop of blood.
Spookier still, the scammer in that episode was played by Joanne Linville. She bore a striking resemblance to Theranos’ Holmes.
Here is a short clip from YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4tSf3mdhqg
Sounds like typical Silicon Valley ethics.