The Tale of Theranos and the Mysterious Fire Alarm

Hey Zeroday,

I agree with point 5 and 4, it's a bit of a bandwagon.

However the article doesn't contain the quote you mentioned in point 3. Also, the only reported death due to Theranos that I can find is the sad death of the Chief Science Officer who killed himself.

I disagree with the premise that she should be fired. Reporters pitch stories all the time with specific premises... I'm trying to imagine taking what she wrote and putting into any kind of coherent narrative. It's not the kind of thing that would have made an impact, I don't think.

What are you talking about?

She came to the story with an expectation of the story she was going to write - a consumer-focused story about the finger prick stuff. You say "predetermined framing", as if she's covering a political issue and is biased, but what you're actually talking about is just the normal process of "reporter comes up with an idea for a story, and goes out to see if they can get it done". This is no more problematic than, say, a reporter going to the zoo with the "predetermined framing" of writing a story on a Panda bear.

She wasn't 'bribed'. I don't see any supporting evidence for that whatsoever. Theranos PR tried to get her to back off by threatening to pull the interview with Holmes, but the reporter didn't agree to that, so it didn't happen.

She sat on the story not because she "couldn't spin it the way she had intended" but because the story she set out to write simply wasn't there. She couldn't write a consumer-focused story about "less is more" without finding patients actually getting the finger prick, and she couldn't find any patients getting the finger prick. What she did find was a bunch of suspicious behavior, but the suspicious behavior alone wasn't a story.

Yes, she could have decided to spend a while digging in the hopes of uncovering a different story altogether about Theranos. But I can't really fault her for not doing that. Maybe (without knowing anything about the journalist) that kind of investigative reporting isn't what she does? Maybe she knew that kind of story would take a ton of work, if it even went anywhere, and she didn't have the time to do it? Maybe she knew her editor wouldn't approve that kind of story? Or something else entirely. Most likely, she just had some suspicious stuff, but didn't have enough to sustain the belief that Theranos was actually engaged in widespread fraud, and so decided that it wasn't worth spending a bunch of time tracking down the likely-innocuous explanation, especially since a Theranos lawyer promised her that more than 50% of test were done with a finger prick.

Do you realize that journalists don't get to pick how they spend their time? They're just like other employees: a manager decides what they should be working on.

In this case, management had wanted the Holmes interview. The journalist couldn't deliver that, but came back with the seed for a different story: is Theranos actually doing finger-prick tests? We don't know who decided not to pursue that story, but it seems reasonable to assume it wasn't the journalist.

Now you want the employee fired for that decision. It's totally unfair. If you want journalists to be free from employment constraints, you should be donating to individual freelancers so they'd have financial freedom.

The seems to be the oldest post on HN (Sept 8 2013, 211 upvotes, 113 comments)

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

It doesn't feel that much more skeptical than typical HN threads about new companies. And skepticism/confusion was going to be more prevalent given how few HN users (relatively speaking) are in the health field.

Funny enough, if you scroll down far enough, you run into a comment that sounds like it came from a prophet. Or someone experienced in the field:

> The company is all hot air. They have a board full of retired military figure heads that have no experience in medical devices or retail services. Additionally, they do not have any products to show. Look at their patents. They are all very general and broad. There has been NO FDA CLEARANCE for anything they are doing, which raises legal questions. Speaking of legal, search for lawsuits they are involved in. Their core technology is not even theirs. They stole it from someone else.

That the board was heavy DC/military was well-known, or at least public. But I don't think it was well known that Theranos was heavily reliant on using other technology.

Sadly, that Theranos critique came from a one-use throwaway account. So likely an insider (or jealous competitor)?

From what I understand theranos pitched a lot of the traditional life sci and even tech VCs, but these firms were very skeptical. Especially the biotech VCs do a ton of scientific / technical diligence before investing and theranos almost certainly wouldn't have made it through their diligence filter

I think a few notable VCs actually spoke out critically of theranos, can't recall which, but it is saying something if a VC goes on record publicly criticizing a high profile starrtup