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Elizabeth Holmes urged employees to hide Theranos’ lab equipment from inspectors

arstechnica.com

21–30 of 264 posts

Re: Elizabeth Holmes urged employees to hide Theranos’ lab equipment from inspectors

#21
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal

The point I am trying to make is way things work in US, most likely C-levels and high level officials of companies get away with it. I am sure there are cases when folks got into trouble. Apple had Antennagate for one of the iphones and even with a class-action lawsuit people got like $15 reimbursement. For these huge companies in most of the time amount of fines are more like margin of error in accounting spreadshee…

Antennagate and a big fraudulent startup in the medical (!) industry are quite different scale things.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes urged employees to hide Theranos’ lab equipment from inspectors

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a second room where they led the inspectors with true lab eqpt while the other had the inaccurate machines (according to the book)

Are you sure it wasn't the other way around? Weren't they pretending to operate their own equipment while the real equipment was 'behind the curtain' ?

Depends on what's being audited. For investors, you want to show a room of gear that other companies don't have. For certification of medical equipment, you want to demonstrate that your process works.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes urged employees to hide Theranos’ lab equipment from inspectors

#23

If anyone truly deserves a very long prison sentence it is Elizabeth Holmes. I think we're about to confirm what we've always known and that has been apparent since the start of this case. That rich white people, even if they got their money by taking advantage of others are pretty immune from harsh punishment in the criminal justice system.

I think you could have just stopped at rich. Money helps anyone going through the US Justice system, regardless of color.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes urged employees to hide Theranos’ lab equipment from inspectors

#25
> “Passing,” Christian told him, “is not an option.” In a later email exchange between Christian and Elizabeth, she told her brother, “You handled this excellently.”

> In a separate reply, Balwani was dismissive of Rosendorff’s complaints and later emailed Holmes, urging her to fire him rather than let him finish his last few days. “We need to respond to him now and cut him Monday.”

The worst management.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes urged employees to hide Theranos’ lab equipment from inspectors

#26

If you haven't read the book "Bad Blood" by John Carreyrou I think you should give it a try. I think it's really worth it.

And the new podcast that Carreyrou is doing for the most updated info on the evidence and trial, “Bad Blood: The Final Chapter”.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes urged employees to hide Theranos’ lab equipment from inspectors

#27

The modern wisdom, "fake it till you make it", requires you to make it, otherwise you'll pay for lying to us.

I'm curious, does this case get so much publicity because it touches upon all the tropes of Silicon Valley? 'Fake it till you make it', 'move fast and break things', 'disrupt the markets', etc. IMHO, this business model is fine when the only things at risk are venture capital and you're trying to sell more widgets, but when it comes to life and safety - bad news.

> IMHO, this business model is fine when the only things at risk are venture capital [...]

Isn't there always more risk than just "venture capital" to this "move fast and break things" model?

Take Uber for an example, sure, they've burned so much cash trying to circumvent laws, but not only have they burned cash, they have also changed economies around the world by burning this cash and trying to disrupt things. Many normal taxi drivers are now without jobs, and suddenly the risk seems bigger than just venture capital.

Same with AirBnb and changing the hospitality sector, and many other examples where it seems there is just cash being burned, but that burn also have an outside effect bigger than just the burn.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes urged employees to hide Theranos’ lab equipment from inspectors

#28

The problem is that none of this will work against her defense, that she was not of sane state of mind at the time.

Wait, that's not her defense from what I've seen. Her defense was that she basically tried her best, was doing actual R&D, there were tech problems, she made some blunders, but failure is not criminal.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes urged employees to hide Theranos’ lab equipment from inspectors

#29
The crazy thing about Theranos is that so many people with experience in microfluidics (developed mainly for DNA sequencing although there are other uses) knew that their claims were impossible, technologically speaking.

Working with such small volumes to obtain quantitive estimates of blood chemistry is so implausible, as you are introducing uncontrollable variability - micro-evaporation, even tissue localization issues, I mean all the trained blood chemistry specialists knew this. I worked a little with DNA microfluidics, and it works because it's not quantitative.

Now, what they could have done is just stuck to pos/neg tests, i.e. 'are you infected with this virus or not' which is a lot more plausible as you don't have to meet a quantitative goal, just a detection goal. Also, one-stop STD screening for HIV / herpes / etc. is possible too (I suggested this and someone responded, 'new company name: ClapTrap").

It's really kind of sad, as Theranos might have been able to pull that off (although new management would probably be required), and then they'd have been positioned to do all the COVID testing (which was a major problem in the initial US response).

What just amazed me is how gullible all the investors were, and how they didn't do due diligence, hire outside experts, or anything. Weird.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes urged employees to hide Theranos’ lab equipment from inspectors

#30
post #4

The problem is that none of this will work against her defense, that she was not of sane state of mind at the time.

Western society is way too tolerant of certain kinds of mental illness, such as sociopathy/psychopathy, and intolerant of others (e.g. anxiety/depression).

Very succinct statement of the issue.

Not only is Western society too tolerant of sociopathy, corporate structures tend to actively filter to top ranks those with such behaviors (just spend 5min reading Glassdoor or any employment-related NH topic...).

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