Walgreen Terminates Partnership with Theranos

The Theranos leadership belongs in jail. Misleading patients with bullshit medical science ranks pretty high up on the list of things that should get executives locked up.

We are talking about tens of thousands of patients here whose doctors made medical choices based on fundamentally flawed blood work, all while Holmes and her buddies were boasting about how disruptive their technology was, how much better they were than the oh so misguided competition, and that validation data was coming very very soon. Plain criminal.

Keep in mind, this is almost half a billion dollars of private investment money that just went up in smoke (and countless man hours from employees who thought they were doing the right thing). When you know how hard academic research labs have to work to get even a hundredth of that kind of funding - when they do much more to advance the field - it's just plain infuriating.

But no, Elizabeth Holmes will get a movie about her, and they'll all fail upward in some fashion - won't be surprised to see them on various boards and advisor positions in the years to come.

The rich get richer, while the general population gets fucked over- the apple is rotten to the core.

I take a little comfort in knowing that something this extreme would never happen in more civilized countries (say Japan, Canada, most EU countries, some South American countries, usw.)

It still baffles me that Walgreens got into this partnership in the first place. A complete failure of due diligence.

It's shocking to find out that a science education is actually pretty useful for leading a science company. DFJ and the other investors should be getting way more of the blame for not doing proper due diligence on Theranos. It's kind of amazing in a way that the company is still a going concern. There is going to be no salvaging this company, because it has nothing of value. What a shmozzle.

I agree that Theranos's leadership belongs in jail.

But I think it's worth reflecting a bit on how much our community created and benefits from the tech-genius hype cycle that they exploited. On how much we have supported a mythos that our cutting-edge innovations can't be judged by existing stick-in-the-mud regulators.

I'm not saying that those are entirely bad things. But it's worth remembering that Theranos couldn't have happened without Silicon Valley. If we want to keep the latitude we've been given, maybe should be more vigorous about policing the people making use of it.

IIRC a number of Japan's corporations still work fairly closely with the Yakuza, don't they?