
We Shouldn’t Be Surprised at the Theranos Fraud - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/60/searches/does-theranos-mark-the-peak-of-the-silicon-valley-bubble
======
kumarvvr
The most amazing thing about this whole situation is that there were experts
in the field who were shouting out about the impossibility of Holmes' claims
right from the beginning.

The media, though, never paid enough attention (or was possibly subverted by
Theranos itself) to the naysayers.

These incidents ought to remind us the exponentially important role media
plays in our lives and how important it is that we come up with a framework to
penalize misleading journalism, while at the same time, preserving the
independence of media.

Maybe that is the next social challenge for entrepreneurs in the coming
decade.

~~~
lhorie
> come up with a framework to penalize misleading journalism, while at the
> same time, preserving the independence of media

Why this obsession with penalizing people? Journalists might not know better.
At some point one needs to take some responsibility in determining whether
what they are consuming are actually reputable data sources or just cheap/free
entertainment and hearsay, and one needs to realize that news outlets have
inherent biases towards telling stories that are extraordinary or otherwise
appealing.

Ultimately, shouldn't everyone be applying critical thinking and the
scientific method to come to their own conclusions about the world?

~~~
lomnakkus
> Journalists might not know better.

I don't understand why this would excuse anything. Journalism is almost
literally their about to (get to) know better about things and explaining to
the rest of us.

At least, that's what it should be -- these days it seems to be mostly about
generating clickbait. (Sorry if that's cynical -- I've just read Trust Me, I'm
Lying.)

> Ultimately, shouldn't everyone be applying critical thinking and the
> scientific method to come to their own conclusions about the world?

Of course, but there's limited time to investigate everything in ultimate
skeptical detail, and so we rely on others we trust.

~~~
tankerslay
>these days it seems to be mostly about generating clickbait.

Yes it's a bastardization of their profession, but everyone needs to eat.

Who knows if we'll ever get back to the quality of journalism in the
Woodward/Bernstein era, when the large majority of middle-class Americans paid
a monthly subscription to have professionally composed news delivered to their
doorstep every morning.

~~~
mhneu
Subscribe to nonprofit, or family-run, journalism that cares about the truth.
ProPublica, Guardian, WaPo, now maybe LA Times, NYT (but avoid their
bothsidesist politics coverage), Mother Jones, Talking Points Memo, New
Yorker, etc. As long as truth seeking journalists are in control, all good -
but carefully watch for ownership changes.

------
sytelus
The book Bad Blood is amazing and extremely gripping. The question, however,
why Holmes did this is still open. The critical point to remember is that
Holmes never sold her shares and in fact she kept accumulating more. She
didn't need IQ of 150 to figure out that going live with erroneous medical
devices would get her slammed with lawsuits from patients. If she just wanted
to dup investors to become rich, she could have done it real easy by stepping
aside, let someone inherit the mess and then selling her stack. In fact her
board asked her to do just that before WSJ found out and she refused it. I
have seen her plenty of talks/interviews and its super hard to believe she was
working with malicious plan all along. Part of me wants to feel that her
desire was genuine to some extent and she just hoped things would work out if
she pulled lies and deception long enough to keep raising funds. She had lots
of top tier advisors who have done exactly that to establish their own
companies. I'm not defending her by any measure, she was classic bad manager
with Balwani topping even her. There was a very little chance she could have
actually ran talented team longer term - but this is precisely the part book
conveniently leaves out.

~~~
sametmax
She probably believed in her project.

You can't know if you are going to succeed when you try to achieve a
revolutionary feat. But you have to act like you are sure you will.

Imagine Jobs in an alternate universe, trying to get out the iPhone, but after
years of failures and billions wasted, the world realize the product vision
was unrealistic.

Basically him being the same asshole, but hitting a wall many predicted.

That would look the same as Theranos.

The difference is that Job didn't fail. But he couldn't know that before
trying and commit many people and resource to it.

Imagine Elon failing as the Falcon X. Or worst, failing over and over until
his company died because they lost control of one that went crashing into a
school.

Imagine Zuckerberg called out about all the privacy issues on FB before it
actually made benefit. I would have died.

When you try to achieve radical vision, you often either succeed as a hero or
you fail as a vilain.

~~~
cleong
But in that alternate universe Apple would still have been a huge success, and
the iPhone would have been another failed product like the Windows Phone. In
addition to this pattern to success, Jobs was not a criminal. Theranos made
VERY negligent statements such as the military using Theranos products(they
did not).

~~~
sametmax
> But in that alternate universe Apple would still have been a huge success

Replace iPhone with iPod and Apple never reaches this sky it's currently at.
It the product that put it back on the map, open the itune cash valve and
paved the road for the iphone flag ship product.

The situation is never _exactly_ the same. But you can see a pattern. And
history is written by the victors.

> Theranos made VERY negligent statements such as the military using Theranos
> products(they did not).

Musk, Jobs and the rests lied as well, just on a different scale.

The scale does make it worse, but the mechanism is the same. If Theranos had
delivered, nobody would recall this lie.

~~~
cleong
Your right about history written by victors, however if Theranos delivered
would there be fraud? The issue at hand is that she said she delivered when
she did not.

~~~
sametmax
Of course, but failing show it as the fraud it is. Succeeding would have made
it appear just like a "risky bet".

------
timoth3y
It's not unique to Theranos.

It's all part of the perverse incentives involved with well-funded tech
companies.

There is no real incentive to call out fraud. As an investor or a partner you
might pass on a deal, but to go public with your concerns means risking a
possible lawsuit, raising the ire of the people who are already on the
bandwagon, being excluded from future deals, and being dismissed as someone
who is out of touch and "not getting it."

Contrarians can short publicly-traded companies, so there is a financial
incentive to call out BS, but for private companies there is very little
upside in raising concerns publicly.

If you doubt this effect, contrast the number of articles talking about how
blockchain is the future with those taking a hard look at blockchain's
financial viability for specific applications. The former group are the ones
being asked to speak at conferences and landing large consulting contracts.

~~~
ThrustVectoring
Short traders and put option holders have to also get the timeline and
technical factors right to get paid. See the debacle with LongFin. The right
play was to go long and make money off borrow fees. The bears got hosed by a
trading freeze that kept them from closing their shorts or from acquiring
shares to sell for their expiring put options.

~~~
timoth3y
True. That's why so many of them try to "leak" the problem to journalists
after they have taken their short positions.

I mean it's not a perfect system, but at least in the public markets, there is
some financial incentive to expose deception.

------
ChuckMcM
It works both ways though, a lot of people said Tesla was a fraud and they
couldn't build a "real" electric car with a range of 300 miles. And to the
credit of the critics they weren't wrong, there was some serious integration
of battery technology that had never been done before that made it possible
for the Model S to exist.

Not that I'm defending Theranos, they should have come out and said "We're
running into issues" waaaaaay before they did and way before they put kiosks
into Walgreens. That their diagnostic technique seemed impossible to experts
doesn't disqualify them, but once they had failed to get it to work
themselves, and yet assert that it does. That is when it steps over the line
into fraud as far as I am concerned.

~~~
cepth
I think the differentiator vs. Tesla is that Theranos promised things that
are/were physically impossible. Putting aside Tesla's long history of delays,
I think it's fair to say that the company has delivered on some of its core
technological promises. Battery pack cost per kWh is close to dipping below
$100, Tesla has dramatically reduced their use of rare earth metals in their
packs, they've helped alleviate concerns around thermal runaway in their
packs, and various academic and anecdotal accounts have shown that Tesla
batterypacks hold up well even after hundreds of thousands of miles of road
use and thousands of recharge cycles. These are all meaningful advancements in
basic science.

In the Carreyrou book, one clear example is the explanation of why Theranos
couldn't possibly do "all blood tests" on a single drop of blood. On an
individual test basis, finger pricked blood is different in chemical makeup
from blood drawn from a vein. If you're testing for certain diseases, even
assuming that you had equipment sensitive enough to find small concentrations
of a target element or organism, the finger pricked blood may just not have
those markers at all.

Secondly, blood testing is a destructive process. If a doctor orders an
immunoassay and a pathogen test for a patient, it's close to physically
impossible to run both tests on Theranos's much touted "single drop of blood".
You would be using up portions of an already tiny sample to perform the
reactions necessary for each test. The premise that you could do multiple
tests on a single drop of blood was a false one from the start.

Third, the purported form factor of Theranos testing machines, a small Apple-
esque box, created physics problems from the start. Proteins and cells in
blood are hyper-sensitive to temperature. One of Elizabeth Holmes's
subordinates literally repurposed a glue robot to perform the basic blood
testing tasks that would normally be done by a human. Imagine trying to have a
tiny robotic arm trying to pick up tubes of blood from a tray, and perform
chemical reactions, all within a shoebox-sized machine. Trying to leave enough
room for the robot to physically swing its arm, and maintaining an acceptable
level of heat dissipation so as to not destroy the samples was a challenge
that Theranos never solved. At a certain point, you're running up against
basic laws of physics and the literal limitations of space.

~~~
AstralStorm
The latter points in robotics are solvable with very clever design (not a glue
robot). The sampling issue is not, though.

------
rotskoff
While Theranos relied heavily on excessive optimism about technology's
potential to solve a major problem, it also relied heavily on outright fraud.
It's true that they had assembled a board of non-experts that were duped by
unrealistic promises, but when the investors were lied to (as is being alleged
in court) it seems difficult to say this is a symptom of some sort of cultural
problem among investors.

~~~
xevb3k
I just finished reading the new book on Theranos.

I’ve seen very similar things at other science based/biotech startups. In
particular, over-promising and misrepresenting the state of development. Quite
often these companies are funded by traditional tech investors who don’t know
how to do DD on science-based/biotech startups.

The difference with Theranos is that they messed with the FDA. They did
consumer testing, and publicly raised their profile to the point where they
couldn’t be ignored.

If they hadn’t started doing consumer testing with a device that essentially
doesn’t work, I doubt we would have heard of them.

Most of the investors would be happy right-off the investment. Even with
Theranos, I believe it’s only the smaller investors who are making a fuss now.
Larger investors know the money is gone, and there’s not much point in suing.

~~~
tptacek
I think most of what went wrong with the FDA happened _after_ Carreyrou's
first WSJ article came out, didn't it? That WSJ article basically killed the
company.

~~~
cepth
The timeline/impact is a bit murkier.

Carreyou had two big revelations. One was that Theranos was not running blood
tests on their proprietary machines, which were supposed to do finger prick
draws. The other was that Theranos had submitted fraudulent validation data to
the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and state regulatory
bodies.

They did a couple brazenly unethical and illegal things.

1) CMS subcontracts lab inspections to state regulatory bodies. When
California lab inspectors visited Theranos, they physically blocked off the
door leading to a floor that had the Siemens equipment, presumably to hide the
fact that they were not conducting tests on their own proprietary machines.
So, the inspectors never actually inspected the relevant labs.

2) Theranos violated "proficiency testing" guidelines. Proficiency testing is
the practice of running tests on a sample with a known concentration/result,
and comparing results. The spirit, if not the letter, of the guidelines is
that you run the tests on the same equipment as would be commercially used.
Thus, Theranos sent in fraudulent tests by testing using Siemens machines.
This proficiency testing duping was what caused Tyler Schultz to send in an
anonymous tip to the New York laboratory regulatory body, and led to his final
decision to leave the company.

3) Theranos tried to claim with the FDA that its tests were "laboratory
developed tests", i.e. they were unique tests that could not be compared to
existing market tests. Carreyrou has a scoop in the book that Theranos
benefited greatly from a bureaucratic power grab between the FDA and CMS. Both
agencies claim some sort of regulatory oversight for the blood testing market.

At least initially, there were many in the FDA who were suspicious, and wanted
to send inspectors. But, Theranos's seeming passing of CMS inspections allayed
fears in the short term. It was after Carreyrou's first two articles (IIRC),
that the FDA sent a surprise inspection.

EDIT: I also think that in the book Carreyrou mentions that a number of
doctors in the Phoenix area, where Theranos was doing a test pilot of their
finger prick tests, had filed complaints with the state or federal regulatory
bodies. So, there were definitely people at CMS or FDA who were beginning to
pay attention.

~~~
tptacek
Right, but doesn't the whole Tyler Schultz timeline feed right into
Carreyrou's first article? Schultz was one of Carreyrou's star sources; the
back quarter of the book basically documents Theranos' retaliation against
Schultz.

~~~
cepth
I think we may be talking past each other here. I just wanted to say in the
previous comment that Theranos was already on the radar of the FDA and other
regulators prior to the publication of that first article. Early complaints of
Phoenix-area doctors about bizarre Theranos test results had already reached
regulators by the time Carreyrou went to press.

If what you meant was simply that the FDA launched enforcement action after
the publication of the article, then my apologies. No argument from me there.

~~~
tptacek
I doubt we disagree strongly. Also, all I know about this story I know from
Carreyrou's book; you might know a lot more than me. Unsurprisingly given my
source, I have the impression that Theranos might have survived the FDA stuff,
had the WSJ debacle not occurred.

~~~
xevb3k
I think that’s possible.

But if it wasn’t consumer testing, then I don’t think it would have been news,
and the fallout wouldn’t have been as big.

So, we possibly agree. The fact that they started doing consumer testing with
a device that didn’t work made this news.

However, similar kinds of lies/misinformation gets told to investors in
biotech startups all the time. That they actually did consumer testing is what
made this news.

~~~
usrusr
How does the start of consumer testing mesh with the investment timeline?
Unless testing only started after the last investment was committed, the two
are the opposite of unrelated.

~~~
xevb3k
I can’t quite parse this comment.

But I don’t believe it was quite clear that the consumer testing was a fraud
until just before the last round of “investment”.

I put “investment” in quotes because the last 100MUSD was kind of a loan,
based by their parent portfolio... so they’ve effectively sold what assets
they have.

So yea, consumer testing appears to have been fraudulent, and after that
became clear publicly there wasn’t much further investment.

------
cuddlypsycho
Elizabeth Holmes did not happen in a vacuum of course. She is a by-product of
a culture that idolizes youth, raw enthusiasm, and passion over experience and
pragmatism.

Socially shaming and silencing her critics by branding them as old-fashioned,
sexist and unsupportive of female CEOs in tech by the media did not help the
situation either.

------
tptacek
The book is really good, well-written and paced like a thriller. I never paid
any attention to Theranos during its heyday, and it was especially interesting
after reading it to go back to the old HN threads about it and see what the
community here predicted about it.

~~~
malshe
I agree. I bought the audiobook and I was looking for every opportunity to
listen to it and get to the end. It made me actually stay on the elliptical a
little longer in the gym :)

------
ezzaf
This snippet is amazing:

"Theranos kept up the illusion that they were running a lot of the tests from
finger-stick blood draws by hacking the Siemens machines to work with small
samples"

No wonder they had so many inaccurate test results.

~~~
cepth
The full process as described in the book is even more shocking.

Theranos would dilute the finger stick draws, and then run them on the Siemens
machines 5 times. In theory, you could then calculate the concentration, and
adjust for the dilution. In reality, the diluted samples would have
concentrations of the relevant cells and elements that were too low to pick
up.

To “fix” this, they would do those 5 runs, then calculate the median. And, if
you had 5 outliers in all different directions, they’d discard the run and do
5 again.

The fact that PhDs and doctors who swore the Hippocratic oath allowed this to
go on for over a year is shocking.

~~~
mikekchar
I don't know much about Theranos, but I remember writing a proof in
university. The TA in the class was a PhD student doing research in group
theory. My proof relied on doing some manipulation of exponents and there was
a point where I was doing "1 + (-1) = 0". The TA just could not understand
that bit. He was absolutely sure that in some circumstances this wouldn't
hold. No amount of discussion about how integers form a field under addition
and multiplication would convince him. He eventually got his PhD and I can
only assume he's working for a company like Theranos.

Cue someone replying and telling me why I was actually the one that was wrong
;-) But the point is that even well educated people make really, really stupid
mistakes.

~~~
cepth
Fair enough! The book is worth the read.

I think I may be being a bit unfair to the scientists. Basically, Theranos was
a hot enough startup that Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani would fire,
demote, or marginalize anyone who made a fuss. Lifelong academics may have
never had to deal with that kind of bullying/pressure before.

On the other hand, they had some pretty incredible scientific talent on staff.
You would think that people who are highly cited and have a reputation to
protect would have spoke up sooner. Instead, the first two people to make any
kind of sustained fuss were two fresh out of college hires.

~~~
busterarm
Are we sure about this? My impression of this lately is that to be a lifelong
academic is to constantly put up with bullying and pressure.

Such is the nature of competing in a status-economy.

~~~
Fomite
There are definitely some labs I know people who have worked in that would
give the most abusive startup a run for their money.

------
pseingatl
But we can be very surprised at the disparity in treatment between Theranos
execs, who got off scott free, and Pharma Bro, who made all his investors
whole and still got prison.

~~~
psergeant
Pharma Bro needs to go to prison to stop the next arrogant idiot who thinks he
can dig himself out of a hole from attempting to do so.

That he actually managed to is great — for his investors — but it’s not a
course of action society wants to promote.

~~~
Bartweiss
It was pretty much the stock equivalent of check kiting. If you've got enough
money coming in, you can often fill accounts before the checks clear and steal
nothing; the reason it's illegal is that you're hiding risks by claiming to
have the money in hand.

------
Alex3917
During a bubble assets are overvalued even when everyone has the known facts.
If a valuation is based on fraud then it's not indicative of a bubble.

~~~
zeth___
The difference between fraud and development is a very small one. As Telsa
motors will show in the next 9 months.

~~~
kumarvvr
Why so much hate for Tesla?

Maybe Elon is over confident, over enthusiastic, short sighted, etc. but his
vision is world class and world changing.

And he has delivered, consistently.

~~~
jcranmer
Substitute Elon Musk and Tesla (particularly back in 2017) with Elizabeth
Holmes and Theranos back in 2014, before the big exposés started coming out.
From the perspective of the lay investor, what distinguishes the two cases?

This goes to answer both your comment and (at present) the top comment of this
post, which asks why people ignore a chorus of naysayers saying that what's
being done is impossible. The entire mindset of the Silicon Valley disrupter--
we're the plucky underdog fighting an established oligopoly by doing the
impossible (at least for the established oligarchs)--is very ripe for an
unethical fraudster to milk. Distinguishing between the two cases is not easy,
especially given the tendency to believe your own hype and oversell your
current capabilities.

~~~
psergeant
> From the perspective of the lay investor, what distinguishes the two cases?

You can buy a Tesla car today, strip it down, and confirm it works and isn’t a
giant Potemkin village?

~~~
buvanshak
>You can buy a Tesla car today, strip it down, and confirm it works and isn’t
a giant Potemkin village?

What about "Full self driving hardware"? I am pretty sure you are not going to
find it there.

And people have bought them thinking that it (full self driving functionality)
is just one update away...

~~~
dpark
In fairness, Tesla has promised that at some point _in the future_. They have
not claimed that they have full self driving currently. Theranos claimed to
have their system working.

~~~
buvanshak
The claim is full self driving _hardware_ right now, right?

~~~
dpark
_Shrug_. Maybe they do have everything they need for self-driving in terms of
hardware. Given that no one has full self-driving, no one has an actual list
of the necessary hardware.

I still see a claim about future functionality as a far different thing (even
if they are _wrong_ ) than a false claim about existing functionality.

~~~
buvanshak
> Given that no one has full self-driving, no one has an actual list of the
> necessary hardware.

Exactly what makes this false claim. Imagine someone gave you a drug and claim
that it _can_ cure cancer. It would be a false claim, even though it is
possible that in future, it might turn out to be capable of curing cancer, by
some specific method of application. The only problem is that that method is
unknown today and no indication that such method might actually exist..

So just because in theory, you can strap on two forward facing cameras and
call it full "self driving hardware" (because that is what humans have). Would
you consider it legit?

~~~
dpark
If I invite you over for dinner and tell you that I'm going to order Chinese
food, but then I order Mexican food instead because the Chinese restaurant was
closed, that's not a "false claim" and it's not fraud. It's simply incorrect
(and annoying and perhaps shortsighted). Fraud requires _bad faith_. If you
make a claim in good faith, then it is not fraud, even if it turns out that
you are wrong.

If Tesla believes, in good faith, that their hardware is sufficient to enable
full self-driving, them it is not fraud. They might be wrong. They might even
be _incompetent_ , but that's not the same as fraud. Obviously, if they do
_not_ believe their hardware is sufficient, then it _is_ fraud.

Now, if Tesla sold you a car and told you that it is capable of fully self-
driving _right now_ , that _would_ be indisputable fraud, because this claim
cannot be made in good faith. This is what Theranos did. They did not claim
that they had a potential solution. They claimed they had a completed product.

~~~
buvanshak
You are squinting too hard. Don't squint too hard. You ll miss out all the
important details.

As you said earlier that "no one has an actual list of the necessary
hardware". And if that is true, claiming that "our cars have full self driving
hardware", is nothing but a big, fat lie.

That is like selling a computer by saying that it has "full stock prediction
hardware".Oh, I am not a fraud because I sincerely believe that my computer
can see into the future. It just needs the right software. Oh believe me, I
make this claim in good faith.

What a crock of shit.

~~~
dpark
Again, _shrug_. I don’t know that Tesla is wrong. They already have AutoPilot.
It is not entirely unreasonable that they believe the gap to full self driving
will be filled entirely by software.

You insist on assuming that they are operating in bad faith by making a
prediction and you keep giving bad faith examples as metaphors. If I sold you
a car and told you that a future update would automatically dim and brighten
the headlights based on whether the road was empty, would that be fraud?
Assuming your car came with what I believed to be sufficient hardware
capabilities to pull this off, this isn’t a bad faith claim unless I do not
_intend_ to deliver.

~~~
buvanshak
>Assuming your car came with what I believed to be sufficient hardware
capabilities to pull this off...

You have said it yourself that no one know enough to make this assumption. How
can Tesla then make this assumption?

~~~
dpark
Ok. From your standpoint literally every contract for work/production is
fraud. Until you do the work, you can't be certain you can produce the
contracted result, so it's fraud.

Your argument boils down to being unable to predict the future with 100%
accuracy. Most people don't consider the constraints of reality to constitute
fraud.

~~~
buvanshak
That is what you said. You said no one knows the full list of hardware
requirements to make full self driving work. Tesla is claiming that their cars
have this "full hardware for self driving".

In other words the company is as genuine as the quack around the corner who
sell cancer cure...

~~~
dpark
And general contractors don’t know the full list of requirements when they
take a job to remodel a house. And yet they will claim with full confidence
that they have all the necessary expertise and equipment to do the job.

Complete quacks, right?

~~~
buvanshak
I applaud your mental gymnastics by which you put full self driving to be
similar to that of remodeling of a house.

I have nothing else to add. Thanks for the laughs.

------
clearf
An interesting side note about this story is the homogeneity and lack of
relevant background among Theranos's board of directors. All the outside
directors were white, prestigious (former generals, senators, cabinet
secretaries, etc) and relatively old. Research shows that homogenous groups
are less likely to challenge each other.

My coauthor and I wrote about this in our book Meltdown (Published by Penguin
Press in in March). We drew on Carreyrou's excellent reporting and some pretty
interesting research about how team diversity affects decision making.

~~~
kumarvvr
> Lack of relevant background among Theranos' board of directors

Yeah, it's pretty clear that it was by design.

Moreover, Holmes seems to have known the impossibility of her claims, or
perhaps, was over confident initially about the possibilities of technology
and later came to the realization that current technology cannot fulfill her
vision.

At that point, she should have come clean, but chose to continue the charades.

------
aphextron
Those stupid scooters and e-bikes will be the Aeron chair of this cycle.

~~~
keyle
I'm still shopping for a good Aeron chair... I had one years ago and it was
the best thing I've every put my tooshie on. Joke aside, a damn fine office
chair.

~~~
etaioinshrdlu
Odd, I felt they are kinda heavy, too low to the ground, have an
overcomplicated set of levers, and not super comfortable.

I prefer a $50 chair from office depot...

~~~
dpark
> _too low to the ground_

What does that mean? The height is adjustable. At full height you still find
it too low?

------
mathattack
“Only When The Tide Goes Out Do You Discover Who’s Been Swimming Naked.”

-Warren Buffett

------
duxup
What I don't get is their failure seemed to be very fundamental. Like anyone
who did blood testing knew what their challenges were and they would have had
to overcome several serious challenges all at once to make it work and...

There was zero indication that they had actually overcome any of those issues.

------
hamtr
Weren't most of the investors not actually the "standard" Silicon Valley
investors?

~~~
ciscoriordan
It shifted away from Silicon Valley investors as time went on.

------
timavr
A little bit controversial, but without taking into account the way the
company was run, the only big mistake was using inaccurate machines for
testing and putting the people health at risk.

Everything else is pretty standard SV startup stuff.

------
nyc111
There is this popular Slicon Valley mantra: "Fake it till you make it" I'm
wondering if she was trying to follow this mantra but she was stuck too deeply
in the fake part.

------
Bakary
What amazes me about things like this is that there are so many ways for
relevant information to leak out but until revelations reach critical mass the
fraud can continue unabated.

------
ousta
Im gonna be downvoted for this but whatever. This would never have happened if
Holmes was a man. America is so obsessed by its desire to empower minorities
and woman especially that they will allow them to take risks or do things that
no man on earth would be allowed to do hence playing with lives and healthcare
at silicon valley scale and with billionare investors.

The media is of course the first one to blame for this but also all the PC
shit that people endure.

~~~
growlist
From a certain feminist perspective this behaviour would be seen as reassuring
in that it demonstrates women are just as capable of bad behaviour as men, and
thus are equal.

------
qop
Who's surprised? I don't think most people are surprised, but rather
frustrated and disenchanted about medical technology and medical innovation
outside of university.

------
Animats
Please stop linking to this paywalled site. Thanks.

~~~
tptacek
You've been here long enough to know --- apart from whether or not Nautilus
counts as "paywalled" \--- that paywalled sites are fine on HN as long as
there is a straightforward way to get around the paywall. Complaints about
paywalls are, according to the site guidelines, off topic.

------
EGreg
Betteridge’s law.

------
transfire
All the ballyhoo stunk to high heaven to me -- a case of "doth protest too
much". So, my guess is the tech actually worked (even if not as perfect as
originally hoped). And the company was destroyed by industry players via
government regulation and a massive smear campaign -- and it worked like a
charm. Ultimately they even murdered the lead scientist, faking his suicide,
to ensure the truth is never known. The tech was simply too disruptive to the
hand-over-fist $$$ in the industry, so it had to be put down.

And if you think that's crazy, you haven't read enough history.

~~~
dralley
You sound like someone who immediately dismissed "all the ballyhoo" because it
wasn't what you wanted to believe.

As someone who has followed the whole thing closely, Holmes and Balwani are
snakes, and their fraud is undeniable. The tech is so "revolutionary" that
they weren't even using it, they just hacked competitors machines to use
smaller samples, accuracy rates be damned.

