Perhaps, but a not unknown tactic is to claim that established players in the field are less likely to recognize and act on something like this, preferring the safety of proven technology over the potential risk inherent with game changers.
In tech, this isn’t even always wrong and “fake it until you make it” can work a lot of the time.
But a common theme is that applying internet startup business tactics to Theranos was a terrible idea since human health is involved.
That’s right. The CEO commented that he didn’t want to see the Theranos machines in CVS stores next year because Walgreen’s was too scared to take the risk. FOMO played a big part in the decision making of the companies and investors.
It’s been awhile since I read the book, but I was under the impression that the specialized investors were avoiding Theranos, rather than the opposite.
My opinion of Holmes was that she was what happens when abject stupidity meets an insane level of privilege. I think she believed in everything she was selling. I think she genuinely believed that the only reason that full blood work ups couldn’t be done on a drop of blood was that the idea never crossed anyone’s mind until she thought that thought.
The one thing that never occurred to her was that it would be impossible, because she had the brains of a motivational poster, and she honestly believed that nothing was impossible if you wanted it bad enough.
I don’t think the voice thing is nefarious at all, though. It’s what’s called “speaking from your lower register”
As a professional woman with a rather distinctive high-pitched voice, it’s something I was advised to do at multiple points during my career. I never did, though. My distinctive speaking voice is definitely hereditary, most of my female cousins on my mother’s side have the same voice. Have you ever been in restaurant with a bunch of relatives and had the waiter guess you were all family based on your appearance? I’ve had waiters guess a table full of my cousins were related before he got close enough to look at us, the voice is that distinctive.
Fear Of Missing Out?
(I’ve never seen that acronym before but I’m guessing through context.)
Yes. Fear Of Missing Out
This is exactly the problem. Blood is a complex substance full of individual proteins, cells, and of course thrombocytes (platelets) which have the essential function of sticking to and clumping when exposed to air to prevent fluid flow. The notion that you can take a tiny sample (“a pin-prick”) of blood and somehow distribute it throughout a complex device through hundreds of channels reliability, and then somehow sanitize those channels for the next sample, is fundamentally impossible with conventional microfluidic technology. There are “lab-on-a-chip” devices that can perform a small array of tests on a single drop of blood, but the actual sensors are disposable; not intended to be cleaned and reused.
Holmes and Balwani may have not started out with the intent to deliberately defraud investors but it is clear that they didn’t understand enough about what it would take to make this hypothetical device workable to even understand the criticisms being levied upon it by knowledgable and experienced people. The Heinlein-ism of “Always listen to experts. They’ll tell you what can’t be done, and why. Then do it,” is oft-quoted by the startup crowd and their flock of vocal acolytes as a reason to dismiss criticism of flaky, ill-conceived ideas, but in fact it isn’t that “the experts” are in general jealous of success or want to keep advanced technologies out of the hands of the unwashed masses, but that they have actual experience in what does and does not work.
Stranger
You raise a good point about being advised to lower your voice - and I think upthread there have been references to voice coaches used by actors. A related voice modification is avoiding that, you know? Way that some people, especially young women? Raise their pitch at the end of every sentence?
I hate that upswoop (which linguists have noted is becoming far more common among young Americans of both genders). As a young woman aware of how difficult it was to be taken seriously, I consciously trained myself not to do it. My son did it a lot as a middle schooler (and one of the people who evaluated him for Aspergers identified it as part of his “issues”). While I don’t believe in mocking children, his dad and I were probably “mocking-adjacent” until we gently trained him out of it. (He’s 23 now and hasn’t talked that way in years.)
So that’s a really long-winded way of saying that I have no automatic beef with people who make deliberate modifications to their voice. It really should not be seen as any different than dressing well, hair coloring, or other steps people take in order to present themselves a certain way.
My beef with Holmes is that she did such a piss-poor job of it, and it wasn’t necessary. The few clips where she seems to be using her normal voice sound fine.
(And yes, I know not everyone hears the weirdness in the way she speaks. Obviously, it does not grate on the ears of the majority of people, only those with a peculiar sensitivity to speech sounds. Had she gotten a universally negative reaction when she started doing it, she presumably would have dropped the effort.)
Indeed. I’ve had folks with hare-brained schemes tell me “Experts said the Wright brothers could never make an airplane, so my idea will work too!”
Actually, “experts” never said this. Also, when folks pointed out that Cletus would never be able to fly by gluing chicken feathers to his arms, and that Billy-bob would never be able to fly by jumping off the barn with big springs on his shoes. And they were correct. A dumb idea is usually just a dumb idea.
They also like Schopenhauer:
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
(The third stage of bullshit in Theranos’s case was that it led to indictments).
Then there’s the truism adapted by Carl Sagan:
“But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”
I remember, when watching one of the documentaries, thinking “is having a few vials of blood drawn to test really that much of a problem?”
Holmes seemed to have been really scarred by her uncle’s (normal for diagnostics?) experience and driven to solve a problem that I didn’t see. I get blood drawn all the time for my various conditions (including finger-sticking for glucose) and once you make the hole, how much difference is there between a drop and a few vials?
Vials don’t come from a finger stick usually. Or at all? Whenever I’ve had a blood test, it’s always come from a vein.
No biggie for me, but I’ve been a blood donor from way back, and I don’t have an issue with it. Some people are extremely blood-phobic.
I like the way it was phrased in the original Bedazzled:
Stanley Moon: You’re a nutcase! You’re a bleedin’ nutcase!
George Spiggott: They said the same of Jesus Christ, Freud, and Galileo.
Stanley Moon: They said it of a lot of nutcases too.
Yes, apologies for being unclear. I have done both finger sticks (one drop, maybe several times a day) and vials (taken at a lab via a needle in the crook of my arm).
The problem for me is the hole in my skin - once I’ve been pierced, taking a little more blood for a more thorough test is not a big deal.
In the docs I saw, Holmes cited as motivation seeing her uncle needing to give vials of blood, and wanted to reduce that to a droplet.
While that might make for a tidy sales pitch, it vastly overcomplicates the engineering problem (as cited above) and doesn’t address the “I don’t like getting my skin pierced” problem at all.
The Wright Brothers were the experts. They were pretty much the only experts in that field because they were developing it as pioneers.
To be fair, the Wrights did have a David/Goliath relationship with Samuel Pierpont Langley, who had more formal education and was considered the favorite to succeed over two bicycle repairmen.
Something to be learned there, right?
Don’t dis the bicycle repairman (obligatory Monty Python link).
IIRC, the book suggests that the story was overly hyped and possibly just made up. These type of myths are fairly common.
It’s probably both. Elizabeth would have quickly found out that savvy investors asked too many questions and savvy investors would have found that their questions weren’t getting answered.
It may have been that at first, but then it became deliberately deceitful, such as using other companies’ equipment for testing while claiming it was being done on Theranos testers.
It could be that she simply refused to listen to anything negative after a while. If you have every worked for someone who would only listen to what they wanted to hear then you can relate.
Some people have bad veins. The majority of times I have given a blood sample, the nurse failed to get enough blood out and had to try again in the other arm. The worst was after I gave birth; they stuck me in one elbow, failed, tried the other one, failed again and had to send for a expert to take blood from my hand. I’m somewhat phobic of needles, and I had to go through the experience three times, and ended up with three bruises and three holes in my skin instead of one. I’d certainly appreciate being able to avoid that.
I didn’t get “abject stupidity” I thought it was something more along the lines of Dunning-Kruger effect. (not exactly that, but something in that area.) She wasn’t stupid, just nowhere near as smart as she thought she was (or had been told she was when she was young).
She was also able to charm the hell out of a very specific demographic (white men about 40 years older with a lot of money).
Maybe it says something about me, but when I read the book, I loved the idea. I don’t mind getting blood drawn, but I don’t have to have it done that much (a few vials a year or so), and it’s prohibitively expensive and inconvenient to do it more frequently. And when one of the numbers is odd, it’s hard to tell whether it is something that matters. It seems like it would be really, really helpful to be able to do draws more frequently, more quickly, and more conveniently. That way you (and medical professionals) could actually know what your daily//weekly numbers are, get alerted much more quickly when things start in a troubling trend, and possibly be able to correct or manage issues before they become huge problems.
Pity it both seemed (and was) impossible.