Theranos: trial of Elizabeth Holmes

[Martin_B]

An simple grifter would have cashed out earlier. A fool in too deep would have cracked up by now. No, I think she is one of those self-deceiving bonkers psycopath bullshitters*, like L Ron Hubbard, or [alive people who can sue] They aren't liars - a liar knows the truth - reality is whatever their ego demands in the moment.


(*please enlighten me with the correct term)

Not sure of the correct term, but McKeith? Paltrow? McCarthy?

[Grumble]

Guilty on four charges, not guilty on a couple and unable to reach a verdict on a few more.

[FlammableFlower]

Not sure if this is freely accessible - Chemistry World write up - but it makes some interesting points. Mainly though is the issue that

‘This “fake it until you make it” hype machine does sometimes work in Silicon Valley, where people can make a big push and magically catch up at the last second, but if you try to do that with human tissues and biomolecules it doesn’t work.’ Lowe states. ‘You can’t just wave your hands and pretend that you’ve solved a problem.’

and Theranos was essentially entirely based upon that rationale and that it took whistleblowers to bring it to an end shows the levels of fraud involved.

[Al Capone Junior]

Here's the AP link that I followed

https://apnews.com/article/elizabeth-ho ... c5734b6f24

I just can't understand how so many ppl didn't ask a lot more questions, instead taking a 19 year old who had no scientific training as being the next Steve Jobs. You'd think somebody would have asked for more than holmes' visionary ideas, insisting on evidence of at least plausibility that testing tiny quantities of blood on a single, tiny machine could reasonably replace the current lab standards of so many tests.

[bjn]

The Guardian Science podcast has a episode of Theranos, basically stating it could never have worked

[FlammableFlower]

Yep, it was never going to work. I've still got vague involvement (founders' shares) in a company doing (IMO) interesting pathogen DNA detection on a chip stuff. The one thing in the whole process that was the biggest problem: the engineering of the microfluidic on-chip stuff. All of the chemistry and biology was dealt with years ago. The rest... oh boy. Theranos were claiming to be able to do what we'd be wrangling for years to do reliably on six potential targets but now with a suite of hundreds of targets. Yeah right.

It does turn out that plenty of people with a more scientific background did ask questions and did decline to invest, but it seems they went quietly and that side of things didn't get much in the way of headlines. Far more got taken in.