Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Theranos Misled Investors and Consumers Who Used Its Blood Test

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 104 posts

Re: Theranos Misled Investors and Consumers Who Used Its Blood Test

#41

Post by exelius »

hprotagonist wrote: post #14

I have been a voice in the wilderness since about 2007 on this one, so this is shadenfraude on a level that makes me kind of embarrassed about myself. My background is biomedical engineering, and I just never, ever understood how the sampling rate could ever work. If you're looking for a low-energy signal and your sampling rate is really low, you're just going to miss it and this should've been screamingly obvious to…

Agree with you 100%.

There are definitely areas where a wunderkind can advance the frontier by ignoring dogma about what is and isn’t possible; but biomedical engineering doesn’t seem like one of them.

I always had my suspicions too; her idea seemed so simple that it had to have occurred to larger med device makers too. If they couldn’t solve the problems related to the small sample size with many years of engineering experience, what made her think her chances of success were any better?

Re: Theranos Misled Investors and Consumers Who Used Its Blood Test

#42

Post by hkmurakami »

ryandrake wrote: post #23
hprotagonist wrote: post #14

I have been a voice in the wilderness since about 2007 on this one, so this is shadenfraude on a level that makes me kind of embarrassed about myself. My background is biomedical engineering, and I just never, ever understood how the sampling rate could ever work. If you're looking for a low-energy signal and your sampling rate is really low, you're just going to miss it and this should've been screamingly obvious to…

I don’t think you had to be a biomedical engineer to have called this one, even years ago. Its attributes hit HN (and the gushing tech media) in all the soft spots: young, female founder, college dropout, wore black turtlenecks like Steve Jobs, disruptive tech, attacking a stodgy conservative industry, order(s) of magnitude claimed improvements. It was simply too good and aligned perfectly with the HN zeitgeist. Just…

I've actually never seen a HN thread that was overall positive about Theranos. The top comments were shears critical of the company, despite all the worthy surface level virtue it carried.

Re: Theranos Misled Investors and Consumers Who Used Its Blood Test

#43

Post by semi-extrinsic »

2YwaZHXV wrote: post #39
hprotagonist wrote: post #14

I have been a voice in the wilderness since about 2007 on this one, so this is shadenfraude on a level that makes me kind of embarrassed about myself. My background is biomedical engineering, and I just never, ever understood how the sampling rate could ever work. If you're looking for a low-energy signal and your sampling rate is really low, you're just going to miss it and this should've been screamingly obvious to…

Existing analysers already use very small samples. See Siemens Advia 1800 specs under "Microvolume Technology" https://www.healthcare.siemens.com/clinical-chemistry/system... It only uses 30ul of sample to run up to 15 assays. How is that any different from what Theranos was doing? Only difference is that you collect a bigger vial when using the Siemens machine. And then don't use most of it. So why not collect a sma…

Well, because you can get a sample that's a lot more representative of the actual bulk bloodstream by a) diluting out the contaminants always present in the first part of the sample, and b) drawing the sample from a large vein rather than tiny ones in the fingertip.

Re: Theranos Misled Investors and Consumers Who Used Its Blood Test

#44

Post by exelius »

2YwaZHXV wrote: post #39
hprotagonist wrote: post #14

I have been a voice in the wilderness since about 2007 on this one, so this is shadenfraude on a level that makes me kind of embarrassed about myself. My background is biomedical engineering, and I just never, ever understood how the sampling rate could ever work. If you're looking for a low-energy signal and your sampling rate is really low, you're just going to miss it and this should've been screamingly obvious to…

Existing analysers already use very small samples. See Siemens Advia 1800 specs under "Microvolume Technology" https://www.healthcare.siemens.com/clinical-chemistry/system... It only uses 30ul of sample to run up to 15 assays. How is that any different from what Theranos was doing? Only difference is that you collect a bigger vial when using the Siemens machine. And then don't use most of it. So why not collect a sma…

There’s no benefit to doing so; and smaller vials are harder to preserve. Measurements on blood draws are not exact, and pre-measured preservatives in the vials and the blood have to be in the right ratios.

This is easier to do consistently in larger vials, reducing the error in this part of the process to acceptable levels. It’s the same reason why a recipe will normally be more consistent when making a larger batch.

So you could collect less, but the way the modern lab industry operates (collecting samples, preserving them, and shipping them to an offsite lab for analysis) there is little business benefit to using smaller collection vials.

Re: Theranos Misled Investors and Consumers Who Used Its Blood Test

#45

Post by growlix »

subpixel wrote: post #18

I haven't found an article or comment that gives me any insight into what Ms. Holmes might have been thinking. Did she earnestly believe she was on the cusp of some breakthrough, or that one was inevitable with enough brute-force application of investor money? Or was she shrewd and cunning to the core, calculating that she could siphon off enough money to make it worthwhile and spend enough money to spin the facts? I…

On the "Delusion Con Artist" continuum, I'm inclined to think she's more on the delusion end. If your intent is to defraud, you'd want to avoid a domain that's 1) scientifically accountable, and 2) subject to heavy oversight and regulation. She seems smart enough to know that.

This Vanity Fair piece provides a fair amount of character background: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/09/elizabeth-holmes-the...

Re: Theranos Misled Investors and Consumers Who Used Its Blood Test

#46

Post by tgb »

hkmurakami wrote: post #42
ryandrake wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think you had to be a biomedical engineer to have called this one, even years ago. Its attributes hit HN (and the gushing tech media) in all the soft spots: young, female founder, college dropout, wore black turtlenecks like Steve Jobs, disruptive tech, attacking a stodgy conservative industry, order(s) of magnitude claimed improvements. It was simply too good and aligned perfectly with the HN zeitgeist. Just…

I've actually never seen a HN thread that was overall positive about Theranos. The top comments were shears critical of the company, despite all the worthy surface level virtue it carried.

I believe that this [1] is the oldest thread in HN about Theranos. There are two sub-threads that are negative and one which seems quite spot-on in hindsight. But the top comments are all quite positive.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349349

Re: Theranos Misled Investors and Consumers Who Used Its Blood Test

#47

Post by kolpa »

joezydeco wrote: post #25
subpixel wrote: post #18

I haven't found an article or comment that gives me any insight into what Ms. Holmes might have been thinking. Did she earnestly believe she was on the cusp of some breakthrough, or that one was inevitable with enough brute-force application of investor money? Or was she shrewd and cunning to the core, calculating that she could siphon off enough money to make it worthwhile and spend enough money to spin the facts? I…

I honestly believe Holmes, as a sophomore at Stanford University, believed she had come across an idea that nobody had ever thought of before (low-volume microfluidic immunoassays). The exception is that this science had already been explored, for decades , by the major companies that specialized in this technology. There simply was nothing to show that worked, yet, so there was nothing to commercialize. And the big…

Holmes' lab lead / advisor and orignal bizdev lead was a Dean of Engineering at Stanford. It's not just a sophomore not doing her homework; it's a $$$-eyed senior tenured professor at a premier research university who perpetrated and perpetuated this.

Re: Theranos Misled Investors and Consumers Who Used Its Blood Test

#49

Post by kolpa »

Nomentatus wrote: post #36
joezydeco wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly believe Holmes, as a sophomore at Stanford University, believed she had come across an idea that nobody had ever thought of before (low-volume microfluidic immunoassays). The exception is that this science had already been explored, for decades , by the major companies that specialized in this technology. There simply was nothing to show that worked, yet, so there was nothing to commercialize. And the big…

A Steve Jobs-like ability to live in her own reality distortion field, plus much of the salesmanship, but minus Steve's very acute (not perfect) sense of what currently impossible problems were on the cusp of being solved, creating future practical products. There were two companies that I simply couldn't understand, at all, from media reports in the last couple decades. One was Enron, 'tother Theranos. Turned out th…

Jobs's job was to look at stuff and see what he could sell, and to demand that employees invent more stuff to sell. Holmes' job was to invent stuff on demand. She tried (and failed) at a much harder job.

Re: Theranos Misled Investors and Consumers Who Used Its Blood Test

#50

Post by ethbro »

exelius wrote: post #44
2YwaZHXV wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Existing analysers already use very small samples. See Siemens Advia 1800 specs under "Microvolume Technology" https://www.healthcare.siemens.com/clinical-chemistry/system... It only uses 30ul of sample to run up to 15 assays. How is that any different from what Theranos was doing? Only difference is that you collect a bigger vial when using the Siemens machine. And then don't use most of it. So why not collect a sma…

There’s no benefit to doing so; and smaller vials are harder to preserve. Measurements on blood draws are not exact, and pre-measured preservatives in the vials and the blood have to be in the right ratios. This is easier to do consistently in larger vials, reducing the error in this part of the process to acceptable levels. It’s the same reason why a recipe will normally be more consistent when making a larger batch…

Out of curiousity, how tight are the preservative:blood ratios before Bad Things (i.e. things that would invalidate the test results) start to happen?
Post reply on HN