
The Tale of Theranos and the Mysterious Fire Alarm - c5karl
https://khn.org/news/reporters-notebook-the-tale-of-theranos-and-the-mysterious-fire-alarm/
======
danso
Someone needs to make an anthology of first-person stories about trying out
Theranos. I actually thought the OP article was by John Carreyrou because I
saw it in his tweets (and it makes sense that they'd pull the fire alarm upon
seeing him), but it's by a reporter (Jenny Gold) from Kaiser Health News, who
apparently visited there (Nov 2014) before Carreyrou's WSJ investigation was
published in October 2015.

The only other stories I can think of are:

Eric Lakin (DeciBio Consulting), 10/2015:
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/27/what-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/27/what-
happened-when-i-tried-the-new-blood-test-that-was-supposed-to-change-the-
world/)

Jean-Louis Gassee (former Apple exec), 10/2015:
[https://mondaynote.com/theranos-trouble-a-first-person-
accou...](https://mondaynote.com/theranos-trouble-a-first-person-
account-1690b827539f)

Melia Robinson (Business Insider), 10/2015:
[http://www.businessinsider.com/i-tried-
theranos-2015-10](http://www.businessinsider.com/i-tried-theranos-2015-10)

~~~
wpietri
I would also love to see a survey of the journalism on this. We see now that
Theranos's stuff never worked. But tech press is famously uncritical. It seems
like there's an opportunity for all of us to learn something here about how we
were so easily misled.

~~~
danso
Theranos is an interesting case. Benedict Evans tweeted something interesting
the other week [0], how Theranos, unlike virtually every other Silicon Valley
startups, was very East Coast in style. Particularly with its board full of
old, famous politicians and DC figures like Kissinger and General Mattis.

I didn't really hear much about it until the WSJ blowup, but my perception was
that Theranos wasn't in whatever scene that other startups are in when they
get coverage from TechCrunch, etc. I know Tim Draper was an early VC backer
(his daughter was childhood friends with Elizabeth Holmes), but did other
Silicon VC know much about Theranos?

I know Theranos did end up getting TechCrunch-west-coast-style coverage (I
mean, before WSJ blew it up). But I'm pretty sure that its very first press
splashes were with the Wall Street Journal in Sept. 2013 [1] and then the New
Yorker in Dec. 2014 [2].

The WSJ article was very interesting. Not just because it's ironic, given that
a WSJ investigative reporter would be taking Theranos down. But because of the
setup. It was weekend interview feature assigned to a Pulitzer Prize-winning
editorial board member. And, unlike the New Yorker piece, was almost entirely
a puff piece. Interestingly enough, though, the author describes the
experience of having blood drawn via the fingerstick/nanotainer setup (i.e.
the tech Theranos was aiming for).

Having your first public splash in the WSJ Weekend Magazine seems like a very
East Coast thing. Amusingly, when Theranos was burning down, it was revealed
that Rupert Murdoch had a $125 million stake in Theranos [3]. Which probably
explains the WSJ puff piece, since Murdoch owns the WSJ.

This is all to say that Theranos's early years as a startup seems to have been
much different culturally than the usual Bay Area startup. I wonder how
Theranos would've fared or been different if it had operated like a highly-
funded SV startup (Color, Clinkle, or any other high-funded startup that
didn't die out) with the same hype and attention.

[0]
[https://twitter.com/BenedictEvans/status/972501945813381122](https://twitter.com/BenedictEvans/status/972501945813381122)

[1] [http://archive.is/8dfJ7](http://archive.is/8dfJ7)

[2] [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/blood-
simpler](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/blood-simpler)

[3]
[https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2017/03/24/rupert-m...](https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2017/03/24/rupert-
murdoch-theranos-elizabeth-holmes.html)

~~~
aaavl2821
From what I understand theranos pitched a lot of the traditional life sci and
even tech VCs, but these firms were very skeptical. Especially the biotech VCs
do a ton of scientific / technical diligence before investing and theranos
almost certainly wouldn't have made it through their diligence filter

I think a few notable VCs actually spoke out critically of theranos, can't
recall which, but it is saying something if a VC goes on record publicly
criticizing a high profile starrtup

~~~
baxtr
That’s generally a bad signal, whenever in-industry VCs stay out of a business
and outside-industry VCs go in. Bad signal

------
hristov
That is a heartening example of good journalism. But nevertheless, there is
one thing that I did not like with the way Ms Gold handled the story. She had
an idea in mind of what kind of story she was going to write, and when reality
did not pan out according to her plan, she just decided not to write the
story.

If she had written about her experience she would have had a very important
story and could have saved investors hundreds of millions of dollars.

~~~
GavinMcG
The problem is she didn't necessarily have a story _there_ , either, at least
without an order of magnitude more research, at a minimum.

She went in for a light piece humanizing a new technology. Do you really
expect her to shift gears into a massive fraud, with nothing more than weird
PR pressure and a fire alarm?

------
misiti3780
I have an honest question, what is the end game for Theranos employees. My
understanding is the company is a complete fraud but yet if I go on linkedin
they still have 200+ employees working there:

[https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?facetCurrent...](https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?facetCurrentCompany=%5B%2230702%22%5D)

are all of these people going to be fired in the coming months or do investors
think this is still a good idea but Holmes isnt going to be apart of it ?

~~~
baldajan
I think at this point, investors are trying to salvage what ever tech it has,
and sell the company.

No clue why employees are sticking around, maybe they’re currently looking for
another job and it’s a slow drop to zero.

~~~
nikanj
A mortgage is a mortgage, and a pay check is a pay check.

------
nemild
If it's useful for anyone, I made a list of all the ways engineering media can
be manipulated (including journalists):

[https://github.com/nemild/hacking-
engineers](https://github.com/nemild/hacking-engineers)

I added this example to it since it's a particularly good example of how
marketing/PR uses threats of access and cherry picked demo sessions to get
their favored view out.

(Contributions welcome)

~~~
whoisjuan
Question. When are companies open positions with title names like "Growth
Hacker, are" is their expectation to find someone who would deploy this kind
of tactics? I ask because it seems that there's a line of thought that wants
to legitimize some of these behaviors (voting rings, for instance.)

~~~
nemild
You're absolutely right, that's often the intent.

I approached my project with the hope of creating antibodies that makes those
techniques less valuable. Or at minimal, help a few people better understand
the incentives/techniques behind what they're seeing.

------
jonathanyc
Is there an industry of “black hat PR” people that handle this sort of thing?
Would be really interested if there were any autobiographical novels from that
sort of person, though I suppose, like bank robbers, their success insists
they remain unknown.

EDIT: Just remembered the movie Wag the Dog the Wikipedia article calls the
black hat PR people portrayed therein “spin doctors”. But that seems more like
just PR to me, not setting off fire alarms to scare away reporters (though the
spin doctors in the movie construct a fake war).

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wag_the_Dog](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wag_the_Dog)

~~~
chillwaves
Read the news lately?

[https://www.vox.com/policy-and-
politics/2018/3/21/17141428/c...](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-
politics/2018/3/21/17141428/cambridge-analytica-trump-russia-mueller)

------
CptFribble
Here's something that Theranos was deliberately misleading about: how many
tests can be done on one prick's worth of blood?

Before the downfall, the website claimed that hundreds of tests could be
performed with a single drop of blood. But, is that hundreds of tests on one
single drop at once? Or is it one test per drop? Squeezing dozens of blood
drops out of multiple pricks would not be easy or painless.

Nowhere on the website, or in any press releases, or in any interviews that I
could find, did Theranos clarify this. If they could do 100+ tests on a single
drop of whole blood it would be a revolution, and there would be no reason to
hide it. But, if it was one 4-hour test per drop, that's actually worse than
current state of the art, and they would have every reason to hide it.

This is one of the things that would have been clear if journalists had spent
more time talking to lab experts, rather than Theranos' PR and laypeople in
their offices.

~~~
incompatible
Theranos was claiming amazing technical breakthroughs, but never published
anything that would verify the claims. This was pointed out by a couple of
researchers, Eleftherios Diamandis and John Ioannidis, in early 2015.
[https://www.vox.com/2015/10/31/9646356/theranos-peer-
review-...](https://www.vox.com/2015/10/31/9646356/theranos-peer-review-
evidence)

------
dpandya
One of the most concerning aspects of the Theranos investment has been the
total lack of due diligence in this process.

Putting aside the technology for a moment (it could be considered difficult to
evaluate for most investors), due diligence failed on multiple counts. For
example, Holmes told potential investors they had over $100 million in revenue
when, in reality, they had close to $100,000 in revenue. That's a bit like
trying to tell someone a SMB SaaS business with ~100 customers has the same
traction as, say, Algolia. Hard to understand how this passed through the
filters.

~~~
Thriptic
There is a far simpler way to look at this, and that is to say that this is
why we have peer review in science. If a scientist won't release data or
methods, there is a 99% chance they are bullshitting their claims. Theranos's
product happened to be adjacent to my research space, so I was already highly
skeptical when I heard the initial product claims. When I heard they weren't
releasing data however, I strongly suspected they were bullshit. Many years
later, sure enough..

------
PhilWright
It is good to see the reporter refused to go along with the PR people from
Theranos. But I am surprised they did not still report on the experience and
point out that no-one could be found having the pin prick test and that the PR
people acting suspiciously. Surely that is a story in itself?

~~~
ghaff
I don’t know the exact circumstances but lack of any real info, apparently
suspicious behavior, etc. may trigger spidey senses but (properly) don’t
usually trigger a story in a major pub. Unfortunately that can lead to
situations where lots of people are pretty sure that something isn’t quite
right without triggering an article. But it’s mostly the way news should
operate.

------
solidsnack9000
It’s the stack of a few individually explainable things — no one getting the
finger-prick test, a complaint you’ve never received before, unusual requests
to delete things, a fire alarm at just the right time — that makes them all
suspicious.

------
TaylorGood
I wouldn't put it past Theranos. They have shown their playbook includes
filth. Ask an investor if it would surprise them: "oh s%^t we didn't stop the
journalist, pull the fire alarm"

------
zer0day
I started to write a thoughtful and balanced analysis of this article...but
then I stopped myself.

The reason I stopped myself is that I thought about all the journalists like
this lady who played the same game with Theranos and continue to play similar
games with all of the rotten corporate and government entities in the county.
Then I started getting genuinely pissed off!

What. the. f*ck did I just read?

She openly admits to the following:

1\. She came to the story with a predetermined framing of the story.

2\. She allowed herself to be bribed with the “treat” of talking to Elizabeth
Holmes and then backed off under threat and misdirection while pretending to
be immune to such behavior.

3\. She sat on the story because she couldn’t spin it the way she had intended
in advance and allowed herself to be threatened.

I am not exaggerating, she literally writes “I lost the story so I moved
on...”

Lost the story directly translates to: “I knew what I wanted to report and
what would get clicks, I didn’t get that so I gave up.”

4\. She proudly presents this article years after the fact pretending to
retroactively have known something was wrong...and to have maintained her
journalistic ethics while openly admitting to dropping the story once it
didn’t fit the framing she hoped to apply to it.

5\. She waited until well after the tide of public opinion had turned against
Theranos to capitalize on the work of others who actually did the hard
journalism to get clicks.

This lady should be fired, she is not a journalist. Why should we give her a
pass when hundreds of other fake journalists did exactly the same with
Theranos? When do we all say: “Enough is enough?”

This is everything wrong with American media in one article, the attempts to
feign journalistic ethics after the fact while generating more clicks is
sickening. People died from Theranos!

~~~
pdonis
_> This is everything wrong with American media in one article_

100% agree. What she should have done was not cancel the feature, but write
what actually happened--right after it happened, not now, when Theranos has
already been outed as a fraud and she's just another one jumping on the
bandwagon.

~~~
DoreenMichele
Maybe you have heard of the Overton Window?*

You essentially can't publish it if it a. Falls too far outside what the
public will readily believe and b. Is not adequately backed up with verifiable
hard facts.

Speculation that they intentionally pulled the fire alarm would have been
considered mudslinging and yellow journalism at the time the research was
done. It's print-worthy now because we now know that Theranos did so much
dishonest crap that pulling the fire alarm is not unbelievable and is such
small potatoes in the grand scheme of things that it isn't even mudslinging.
It's a nit.

* [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window)

~~~
jayess
As a side note, I've started seeing the term "Overton window" more often. It's
a bit shocking because I knew Joe Overton (his untimely death was a gigantic
loss). It's kinda cool to see it used in general discourse now.

~~~
postsantum
In Russia this concept was widely used a couple of years ago. Somebody
published a popular article distorting the idea to the point of becoming a
conspiracy theory against our moral values. Along with so-called "Dulles
Doctrine" it became part of western conspiracy lore

------
plink
Everyone there too rich for jailtime?

------
megadeth
Not deserving of jail time: VC funded, Charismatic founder with a fraudulent
business.

~~~
jannotti
How is financial fraud not deserving of jail time?

~~~
marnett
I believe it was sarcasm.

However, she most certainly is deserving of jail time; may Shkreli's precedent
of $~19 million fraud and 7 years pave the way for Holmes. All ratios equal,
the sentence should be ~270 years, naturally.

Unfortunately, because she is well connected to the VC folks, the $750 million
and Ian Gibbons life will all go without retribution.

