91–100 of 124 posts
I wonder why there hasn't been a media outcry like with Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, Richard Scrushy, et al. People wanted those scoundrels drawn and quartered, but no one's calling for her head. Is it because of her sex?
I think a big part of it is that people wanted it to be true. The idea is very compelling. Who wouldn't want it to be true/possible? And it's obvious to anyone how valuable such a thing would be. Plus... Young woman founder/CEO (& paper billionaire as a result). Dropout from Stanford. Silicon Valley. On the cover of magazines. Big names on the board. Association with Bill Clinton, etc.
She's relatively young and attractive and perhaps possesses hidden talents. Like maybe the ability to charm the pants off (so to speak) of men - especially older, rich, powerful men who were in a position to help move her ambitions along. Also men who may have been somewhat blinded to obvious warning signs of potential trouble.
"Small Scale Patent Acquisition and Publication for the Purposes of Misleading Investors and Customers on the Feasibility of Large Scale Research and Development Efforts"
I wonder why there hasn't been a media outcry like with Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, Richard Scrushy, et al. People wanted those scoundrels drawn and quartered, but no one's calling for her head. Is it because of her sex?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
She's relatively young and attractive and perhaps possesses hidden talents. Like maybe the ability to charm the pants off (so to speak) of men - especially older, rich, powerful men who were in a position to help move her ambitions along. Also men who may have been somewhat blinded to obvious warning signs of potential trouble.
Doubtful. If this was common we would have more female startups funded. Just because she is attractive and raised money doesn’t mean she had to use sex to get there. She did go to a Ivy League school which brings a network and credibility in and of itself.
There timing was excellent too. I actually remember thinking a few years ago that all one would need to do to design something like the theranos product is run enough blood samples through a good mass spec and load the date into map reduce. But based on research since then "enough" turns out to be a whole lot.
And there are also scientists who think that ideas like that are ridiculous and biomarkers for certain diseases (like early stage cancer) will never be findable in blood. And many of them are vocal about the fact. But since there are experts on both sides that isn't a clear indictment of the idea.
It is also worth noting that the "crisis of reproducibility" is bad enough in bio that I wouldn't haven been surprised if Theranos had very promising early results that didn't pan out. Thats happened to a lot of people.
Personally I fully believe we'll see a Theranos like product in the next 20 years around the time protein sequencing and mass spectrometry tech gets cheap enough to do studies with on ~millions of people instead of ~thousands.