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

arstechnica.com

241–250 of 264 posts

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

#241

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 is…

it highlights the abject trust rich people place in certain friend of a friend associations. same thing happened with bernie madoff.

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

#242
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide any examples of a high-profile company, ultimately shown to be dishonest, where the early investors were able to “cash out” before this dishonesty became known?

Enron, for one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron#Peak_and_decline_of_stoc...

This is the first one that came to mind for me.

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

#243
post #108

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 is…

A dead giveaway for throwaway board seats: Nobel Prize winners, generals, politicians. Another: “professional board members” who sit on multiple boards but have never had senior executive roles involving profit and loss. These people may be accomplished in their own right, but they know little about business. They are there for lunch, the fat fee, and to pose. And when a big company has a NUMBER of these types, i.e.…

> “professional board members” who sit on multiple boards but have never had senior executive roles involving profit and loss

How do they get to this position without having been senior execs?

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

#244
post #243
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A dead giveaway for throwaway board seats: Nobel Prize winners, generals, politicians. Another: “professional board members” who sit on multiple boards but have never had senior executive roles involving profit and loss. These people may be accomplished in their own right, but they know little about business. They are there for lunch, the fat fee, and to pose. And when a big company has a NUMBER of these types, i.e.…

> “professional board members” who sit on multiple boards but have never had senior executive roles involving profit and loss How do they get to this position without having been senior execs?

I believe these people generally get asked to join company boards due to their network. In a way these people function as lobbyists of the company.

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

#245

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 is…

As someone who knows very little about biology, I watched the HBO documentary about Theranos and am kind of still confused by some of the conflicting claims I hear. In the documentary, they focused a lot on the engineering challenges of the machine they were making. The blood samples would spill, which would gum up the mechanical workings of the machine and make a huge mess and contaminate all the other samples. The…

So, the first issue (detection) comes down to the detection of a target gene at some minimal level using polymerase chain reaction or perhaps an enzyme-binding assay or something like that. These molecular biology techniques can actually detect even a few copies of a gene (i.e. a virus) in a sample tube, so a finger prick could plausibly work for this kind of detection goal. The main thing to keep in mind is the difficultly of quantitative measurements at these low levels. For example, I wouldn't be easily able to tell if my sample had ten copies of the gene or a hundred copies of the gene, certainly not cheaply and efficiently.

But, the blood chemistry tests - the second, quantitative goal - are far worse. Those are supposed to produce results with error bars, I'd guess at least +/- 10% accuracy is what you want (I'm not a doctor or nurse). But if you have a finger prick, well, what about evaporation of liquid volume? You can see it happening on a really good scale, 10 ul will evaporate away pretty fast. Also, is a finger prick (capillary) going to be like blood from a vein?

The problem is that precision with tiny volumes is possible, but requires massive preparation and dedicated professionals and certainly doesn't scale easily. Any such system would have to be calibrated daily, tested (with known standards), then samples would be run, then you test it again... Let alone cross contamination and about a hundred other problems. Furthermore - 26 different quantitative tests at once???

So, that's the kind of thing I meant when talking about the easier detection goal (where 26 pos/neg 'is the gene there' tests on a single sample might be plausible) vs. the much harder quantitative goal.

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

#246

I recommend the "Bad Blood: The Final Chapter" podcast by John Carreyrou. He's the journalist who broke the story and the podcast goes into some detail about the history and also talks about what is going on now.

Or read his book! It's fabulous.

Yeah, I've somehow fallen out of the habit of reading books. Need to get back in :)

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

#247
post #243
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A dead giveaway for throwaway board seats: Nobel Prize winners, generals, politicians. Another: “professional board members” who sit on multiple boards but have never had senior executive roles involving profit and loss. These people may be accomplished in their own right, but they know little about business. They are there for lunch, the fat fee, and to pose. And when a big company has a NUMBER of these types, i.e.…

> “professional board members” who sit on multiple boards but have never had senior executive roles involving profit and loss How do they get to this position without having been senior execs?

Mattis, for example, had a relationship with the company while he was still working in government and had explicit communication with them telling them he wanted to help them get their product into the military.

Getting hired onto the board 18 months after retiring from government (possibly the delay was due to being distracted by getting onto military contractor General Dynamics' board) is the other half of the back scratching arrangement that powers the corporate-political machine that rules the country.

As to how they found him in the first place, presumably friends of friends of parents, their siblings, husbands, wives, etc. Her parents were in political circles in DC, they were good friends with CIA agents, father was an Enron VP, mother was a legislative director for some congressman. It's all very incestual in Washinton, kind of like old royalty.

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

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The voice pitch thing she was doing was a nice touch too.

They say she might testify in her own defense. Of course, the attorneys will always say that, to keep the prosecution guessing. "Hide the ball" is the term the lawyers use. If she does, whether she'll use the deep voice is a big question.

Where can I put money that she will not use the deep voice. She doesn't testify it's a push.

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

#249

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 is…

Why did Theranos insist on using 'a single drop of blood.' Why not be able to run a normal blood sample through an unprecedentedly compact form factor testing unit. Wouldn't that be good enough?

I totally agree with this, and I'm still sad that what Theranos was planning to do with Walgreens was canned.

I mean, if I could walk into a Walgreens, choose from a menu of lots of different tests at transparent, low prices (IIRC a lot of their prices were great), get a normal, standard venous blood draw, and then have that draw analyzed while I finishes shopping at Walgreens so I could get my results in 15-20 minutes, I think that would be a fantastic experience.

Is there some reason the above is not possible or viable?

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

#250

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 is…

> 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. The thing is, the primary goal of an investor is not to invest in companies that are honest and actually do what they claim. The goal is to invest in a company that reaches a valuation high enough to let them recoup their investment at a profit. If that valuation happens throug…

To push this line of reasoning one step further: Therano's CEO's entire strategy seems to have been "fake it till you make it".

In other words, many an actually useful/profitable companies was started on an idea that was known to be impossible from the get-go, but they amass enough capital, visibility and momentum that they can later "pivot" to something that actually works.

Whether that scenario falls in the "fraud" bucket is an interesting question.

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