My GP, who is a solo, and hence had a small practice also had a small lab facility in her clinic. It was one machine about the size of a 1990s office photocopier. Her nurse could draw a tube or two of blood from me in the conventional manner and they could run a CMP & CBC and I’m not sure what else on those tubes in just a few minutes with not much more skill than putting the blood tubes into the machine & pressing [Start]. The equipment itself was rented from LabCorp who handled maintenance, supplies, etc. Much like how Xerox managed copier maintenance and supplies in its heyday.
She later got rid of the machine during a move. Said she’d inherited the lease of it when she bought the practice from a retiring doc and didn’t get enough use / revenue from it to justify the cost. Regulatory issues aside, I could easily see such a machine installed in a booth at a retail pharmacy offered right alongside the flu shots.
Her machine would have dated from the late 2000s, maybe early 2010s. Some progress has probably been made since. Clearly there are always going to be tests that take a while to incubate or settle or whatever.
But for many others, it’s at least conceivable to do them in sorta real time. Your body makes, manages, and degrades all the substances of interest in real time, so there’s no reason in principle it couldn’t be done. Biology being chemistry’s much more sophisticated big brother, that may have to wait until we really can harness biology at will, not just influence bits of it here and there with crude chemical bludgeons.
I found an attorney YouTuber who said that with the good time off, possible transer to a halfway house or home confinement, that he expects her to do eight years in Club Fed.
There are so many single fathers these days it’s insulting to assume that his only role is to pay someone else to be the parent. I have no idea about this particular person, but clearly there are fathers who are real parents.
A lot is the wait is administrative. For instance, i needed a covid PCR test, and i needed to get results in 48 hours. What i found was that there were two providers locally, one used by hospitals and the other used by urgent care facilities and pharmacies. The hospital provider processed every test in under 24 hours, and the other provider (which turned out to be Qwest) usually took 2-3 days, and promised results in … I think 5 days. I have no idea why it took Qwest so much longer, but it wasn’t any technical limitation.
I’m sure lots of tests could be done in a doctor’s office or pharmacy, while you wait. Many from a drop of blood. (Some need cleaner, less damaged, blood cells, if course.) It’s just a question of cost. It’s the magic box that pipes a single drop of blood to the right equipment automatically that isn’t feasible. If you only have one drop of blood, you want to deposit it directly onto the test being done, not put it into a little container, first. And you aren’t going to get a lot of tests per drop.
(bolding mine) I said nothing like what I bolded. All I did was say that I hoped someone else could handle the motherly duties that Holmes would herself be unable to. Then I pointed out that, if nothing else, he could pay someone to do it—something rich people very often do.
Even if I squint, I can’t see how that can be interpreted as saying fathers can’t be a good parent, or even that he couldn’t be the one who fulfills those duties himself. The main reason I doubt it is, again, because he’s some rich guy. And he married a psychopath like Elizabeth Holmes.
This, and this is why I’m confused about her defenders.
I have no doubt that it’s possible to make a machine that performs reagent based test on a drop of blood….as long they are tests that are currently reagent based and can currently be performed with a drop of blood. It may even be possible to perform more than one test with the same drop of blood.
But I’m not sure this idea would be particularly revolutionary, nor would it draw billions in investment dollars. It’s also explicitly not what Holmes was promising.
There is one blood test that I take every few years, a test for ANA antibodies that serves as a general marker for possible autoimmune disorders. This test requires treating the blood sample with a bioluminescent dye and having a technician examine the treated sample under a microscope to analyze the patterns. I sure other blood test are similarly complex including many of the two hundred tests that she promised her technology would cover.
Even after all this, I’m STILL no convinced that she has a consciousness of guilt or realizes that what she did was wrong. I think she is an extreme example of what happens when pressurized privilege meets abject stupidity. I think she thought the idea was everything, that the fact that she once had a thought “Wouldn’t it be cool if my doctor could perform every possible blood test on one drop of blood” was genius level inspiration that made her superior to 99.9999% of humanity, and that the idea itself was worth billions, and that the technicalities were trivial if she had the right mindset and WANTED to succeed hard enough, toxic positivity at its worst.
She got lucky in that her brilliant idea was something she could plausibly sell, and not “I’m going to make a cell phone that NEVER needs charging……although her investors were so blinded by the idea that they’d found the next visionary, she probably could’ve sold them on that.
But I think the reason she was such a successful con artist was that she really believed her own hype. And I think she still does. That’s how stupid she is.
Unfortunately, this isn’t limited to Holmes, or even Silicon Valley startup culture. There is a lot of this going around and when people are desperate for a genius hero innovator they latch onto anyone who can talk real good regardless of how sensible their concept actually is in execution.
Theranos has, what I consider, the two most typical kinds of fraudsters. One is the con artist fraudster who knows the whole thing is a fraud and is just doing it for the money grab (Sunny). The second is the delusional fraudster who believes their own hype and is fudging the numbers and telling white lies until their plan is successful (Holmes). I see this pattern in many financial frauds. Some financial fraudsters are knowingly lying to their clients so that they can knowingly steal their money. Other financial fraudsters believe their “investment opportunity” will eventually work out and if they have to fudge the reports or pay returns from new client investments, that’s just a necessary evil so their investment can eventually pay off. These delusional fraudsters are like gambling addicts who believe they just have to keep playing so the big payday comes in and they can pay everyone back.
I believe Holmes truly believed that the tech would eventually work out. She thought the faked demos, overblown results, phony reports, etc. were all part of the way it’s done in tech startups. As long as she could keep the money coming in, the research could continue and eventually the magic box would be produced. Then Theranos would have huge revenues and investors could all be paid back. Sunny knew all along that the whole thing was bunk and would never work. He was just there to partake in the money train and the success that comes along with it. Although they are both fraudsters, Holmes had less fraudulent intent than Sunny.
If true, by and large she’s not wrong. Overpromising on development and amplifying deliveries is pretty much key to the success of most ‘fast-paced’ startups, which is why most successful startups are doing less basic development and more taking existing technologies and stitching them together in ways that are appealing and stylish. That works—more or less—in consumer products and MMOs, and almost not at all in areas like biomedical.
Well, no. I was specifically replying to someone talking about the child’s mother being absent, and how that could negatively affect them. “Parental duties” would not make sense to refer back to that, as the father would still be around.
Heck, if I had used “parental duties” and referred to the the father paying for such, I would understand the interpretation that I was saying fathers can’t be parents.
I don’t see how talking about mothers denigrates fathers. I don’t see how talking about the role a mother plays in a child’s life denigrates single fathers. I don’t see how acknowledging that a rich guy could at least pay for a nanny “if nothing else.”
I try to think about how my posts might be misinterpreted, but I can’t anticipate everything. At some point, surely I can expect posters to consider my past history and whether or not your interpretation would be consistent with my character. What about me suggests that I think so poorly of single fathers?
Interesting. I did a quick look for such machines and couldn’t find anything, but it’s possible I’m not using the right terms. On the other hand, maybe they gave up–machines too expensive, too flaky, too limited, etc.
Which invites the possibility of someone doing it again, just more economically. The idea of using a disposable cartridge with all of the supplies required for a specific test (or set of them) seems like a reasonable one, and maybe could have reduced the complexity of the machine.
The machine just had one additional transfer from the container. It wasn’t piping any samples around, and as best I can tell most of the tests didn’t involve microfluidics at all, and the ones that did used a disposable chip that came in the cartridge. I think the problem mostly is just that even with no losses, a fraction of a drop just isn’t enough for most of what they were proposing. And possibly that a lot of the box components (like the cameras) weren’t really appropriate for the job.
Who is is “someone” and how can you claim that you aren’t referring to someone other than the father?
You aren’t hoping that the father will be a good enough parent, you are hoping that “someone” will fill in for the mother, and that the father is rich enough to afford that “someone”.
Forget the knowledge of microfluidics, basic medicine, whatever … for the investors, there was one thing they could do that would have clued them in. Run a known blood sample through the machine and see if the results agree. Holmes said the machine worked: prove it, right now! But she always had some excuse. THAT alone should have clued them in.
Sometimes, I think (were it not for real people who trusted the machine for accurate results) it should be legal to separate the stupid from their money.
That’s what I don’t get. Give them ten samples. Three of them have a disease that supposedly can be detected. Give us a result in ten minutes. We don’t even have to be in the room to watch.
There’s something in this argument, though there can be considerable overlap between the two categories.
There are similarities between Theranos’ Big Two and disinformation kingpins like Alex Jones and Mike Adams (of Natural News). Some evidence exists that these types actually believe at least some of the bullshit they promote. At the same time they commonly lie like hell to advance their aims, while gleefully raking in big bucks from their devoted followers. No “white lies” for them.
This is getting personal, and off-topic. Please drop the question of whether fathers perform “motherly duties” and the implications of how that was worded.
In the video I saw, the machine actually WAS piping around that sample, and there were issues with blood sticking, with bad aim as the machine tried to squirt bloody reagents around, and just generally with the basic architecture of the thing.
The machine wasn’t really the problem. If the actual blood test worked, the mechanics could have been worked out. If I were an investor, I’d ask for proof of the blood test from the beginning.
I think the machine, the magic box that did everything, was a large part of the appeal. I mean, yeah, I guess it’s slightly worse to have blood drawn from a vein? But there’s already a decent market for single-purpose tests that can work on a drop of blood. The blood sugar test must be the most popular, but I’ve gotten an antibody test at CVS from a drop of blood, and one or two similar tests at doctor’s offices. Heck, in high school we all tested ourselves for blood type with a finger prick.
There’s nothing transformative about “a few new fingerprick tests”. That wouldn’t be a sexy thing to attract investors.
Her motivation in the first place was that her mom had lots very unpleasant blood draws when she was ill and wouldn’t be amazing if those would have been finger pricks instead. You are correct that having a machine at every drug store and getting to go there instead of a medical office was a huge part of the appeal and that was what attracted the investors. Still, the whole thing would have shut down earlier if people would have asked for proof of the test in the first place. The buggy machine could be handwave away, not so much the fake test.