Probably because white collar people have high dollar lawyers while the blue collar guys have public defenders who just got out of law school and have way too many cases to work on.
The documentary seemed to imply that the anecdotes were bullshit but has any of the many journalists who have investigated the story tried to verify the story about the uncle with cancer?
And regarding the computer-generated scenes of blood spattered inside the machine, I wondered how the machine would have worked in reality? How do they avoid cross-contamination with different blood samples in the machine? Did it have some way of cleaning and sterilizing itself?
According to this, her Uncle died after the company was started.
Thanks. I’m not surprised to find that she exploited her own family for a good story.
Representation is a factor, but there is generally an emphasis in sentencing that places a greater emphasis on crimes of violence than on monetary crimes. Violent offenders are more likely to get more jail time.
Thanks for the info. Again, not shocked by this info at all.
It just goes to reinforce my belief that she was heading into the whole thing intending to con people.
the normal blood testing machines now have a way of avoiding getting samples mixed up so I assume they would use a similar process. The main issue was probably the small size of the new machine vs. the standard machines.
I’m trying to figure out how someone decided that a 19 year old student knew enough about nanotech, blood testing or any of this stuff to be worthy of giving her millions of dollars. It’s not like building a web site in your dorm room or a working prototype of a PC in your garage. I studied structural engineering in college, but no one in their right mind would have let me go out and build a mile-high skyscraper my sophomore year.
I can’t remember if it was in the film, or in an interview I read elsewhere, but Prof. Gardner opined that Holmes was really good at charming the rich, powerful, old men who gave the company credibility, and their buy-in convinced others to pony up.
I am reading the book now. The main technical issue they had was the size of the box , they needed to take existing tech and make it way smaller. She hired a lot of people who were very good engineers and chemists but then she screwed up the management of them and lots of people got fired after just being there a short time or quit after short stints there. Also the board was going to replace her as CEO but then she talked them out of it .
It wasn’t just an issue of minaturizing existing instruments and packaging them into a box; the major challenge is the transport of fluid from the two microvials (containing the equivalent of a drop of blood) to hundreds of different instruments and sensors reliably and without contamination. There are existing blood analyziers which can run a small suite of tests (essentially one processing operation and delivery to a set of sensors) but they require a significant size blood sample and are designed to run post-op cleaning that is really infeasible with the kind of microfluidic delivery system that Theranos was trying to use, which is what people experienced in biomedical blood testing equipment tried to tell her.
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I just saw the film, and yes, Dr. Gardner pointed that out. She also believes Elizabeth’s deep voice is fake (forgive me if this had also been mentioned). I can see how the Elizabeth’s combination of Abercrombie & Fitch attractiveness, pedigree, confidence, and socially acceptable androgyny would be very seductive to a certain kind of guy.
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I just finished the book and it was fascinating how they essentially set the company up to fail. They didn’t let the scientists talk to one another and fired anyone who told them “no.”
The #2 guy (and Secret boyfriend) was almost universally hated. He hired a bunch of people on work visas who needed the job to stay in the country, so would tell him whatever he wanted to hear. It was crazy and morale was rock bottom.
I think I read somewhere that Dr. Gardner (a Stanford professor whom Holmes consulted early on) told her at the very beginning that what she proposed wasn’t possible, because the blood removed via a finger stick wouldn’t be useful for many of the tests, because the extraction method damages many cells. (Presumably this is not a problem for a blood glucose test, given that glucometers using finger stick blood are widely and cheaply available.)
the diabetes test A1c also can be done via a fingerstick. That measures the 3 month average blood sugar level.
I think she will get a plea deal for a year or so in a club fed type prison.
When I was visiting my mother in Salt Lake City in 2004, her neighbors contacted her about a search party for a woman who lived a block away. She had disappeared the day before.
Soon, it was found that the husband had killed her. He was living a fraudulent live. They were in the process of moving to North Carolina where he had supposedly been admitted to medical school, but in actuality, he had never even graduated from college, despite pretending to be taking classes for three years. He had pretended to have an interview at Columbia med school.
I don’t know what goes through the mind of people who are living lives such as that. I suspect that they are simply getting through each day without a master plan and just winging it as they go along, but that’s just me projecting.
You pretty much answered a question I had since I heard of Elizabeth Holmes:
Is the technology something close to being developed in the real world … it’s just that Holmes’ company wasn’t there yet and were (to be charitable) over-promising?
Or is the purported technology simply crazy talk, and thus will likely never be developed in the form Theranos promised?
The latter, at least insofar as using existing techniques to perform serologic testing. We may one day develop a device that can take a drop of blood and run some kind of remote scan on it to perform diagnostics across a wide array of imbalances, pathogens, and markers, but distributing tiny samples for instruments arrayed around a machine in a way that is reliable and doesn’t result in contamination with previous samples is jst not plausible, primarily because how physically difficult it is to deal with really tiny droplets of fluid and then sterilizing the transport channels afterward. Existing and plausible blood-on-a-chip analyzers have single use cartridges where the sensor element is integral to the cartridge and is disposed of afterward. We are more likely to develop some kind of roving nanosensors injected into the bloodstream than to ever make the Theranos “Edison” machine viable.
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They discussed this in Bad Blood. When Theranos started, they hired some top nanofluidics people, and worked on the lab-on-a-chip technology, but it was slow, expensive going. Every change you made to one section altered the performance of everything else in an unpredictable manner, and prototyping new chips was extremely costly.
The decision was made to try a robotic wet lab, and they built a prototype out of commercially available robot glue dispenser. Once they had positive results, they stopped the microfluidic approach, meaning that actual breakthroughs were no longer possible. The Edison machine was described as something that would be impressive if it was built by a high school robotics club.
Except for frequently failing and sometimes catching fire or “exploding” (as described by technicians and engineers working on the machine).
The “wet lab” approach of delivering blood to independent sensors via a robotic assembly guaranteed that it would never be possible to jam all of the necessary equipment into the form factor of the Edison, notwithstanding the difficulty in preventing contamination. The non-water components of blood are largely proteins including thrombocytes (platelets) which have the function of sticking to surfaces and coagulating. Blood is a notoriously difficult substance to clean and without being able to run conduits and exposed surfaces through autoclave conditions maintaining sufficient hygiene to prevent contamination is just not feasible.
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