Ask HN: Elizabeth Holmes has 200 patents – if tech didn't work, why not noticed?

The book, "Bad Blood" (written by the WSJ reporter) goes into great detail about how Holmes and Theranos were able to get away with their scam. "Fake it till you make it" is a thing not particularly bound by physics, especially when you have charisma and the friendship and backing of influential investors and board members.

Incidentally, the book does contain a lot of discussion about patents. Holmes offended a longtime family friend, Richard Fuisz -- who, incidentally, was a former CIA agent -- around 2005-2006. He was mad Holmes and her family never consulted with him about the Threanos idea, so he wrote his own patent (made public on Jan 3, 2008) that he described as "the Theranos killer". It turned into a big legal battle that caught the eye of a Fortune writer, who ended up writing the first big magazine cover story on Holmes/Theranos:

http://fortune.com/2014/06/12/theranos-blood-holmes/

The whole subplot is quite remarkable. Fuisz's battle with Theranos led to some damaging testimony in deposition. Fuisz's son became determined to take down Theranos and from what I can tell, had a big (but mostly unknown) part in the unraveling of Theranos. He found in a Google search a blog post [0] (now taken down) that made serious accusations about Theranos after the New Yorker cover story.

Joe Fuisz, Richard's son, ended up contacting the blog author and telling him about the Fuisz vs. Holmes fight [1]. This blog author ended up contacting a WSJ reporter that he had previously worked with, John Carreyrou.

So rather than science/engineering directly leading to Threanos's downfall, it seems a personal spat played a bigger part. And ironically, this spat involved a guy who wanted to out-patent-troll Elizabeth Holmes.

An excerpt from the book about what started Richard Fuisz's feud:

Richard Fuisz was a vain and prideful man. The thought that the daughter of longtime friends and former neighbors would launch a company in his area of expertise and that they wouldn’t ask for his help or even consult him deeply offended him. As he would put it years later in an email, “The fact that the Holmes family was so willing to partake of our hospitality (New York apartment, dinners, etc.) made it particularly bitter to me that they would not ask for advice. Essentially the message was, ‘I’ll drink your wine but I won’t ask you for advice in the very field that paid for the wine.’  ”

Carreyrou, John. Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (p. 71). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[0] edit: Here's an archive snapshot of the now taken down blog post: http://archive.is/BGtRJ

Carreyrou gives a lot of credit to the author for giving the tip that turned Carreyrou's interest toward Theranos. Strangely, there's not mention of why the blog suddenly shut down. If you google around, you'll see it closed up a few weeks after Carreyrou's first big Theranos story.

[1] edit: via a comment on the oldest HN post (Sept. 2013) about Theranos, I found a link an online summary of the patent dispute:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349870

https://www.leagle.com/decision/infdco20121203541

Any hints as to what that particular patent is about? =)

Is it legitimate to have a CEO add their name to a patent? My impression is that the "inventor(s)" have to be the people who actually came up with the idea.

According to the book, this was one thing that particularly bothered the lead scientist, Ian Gibbons, who was subpoenaed to testify in a patent case:

> IN APRIL, Theranos informed Ian that he had been subpoenaed to testify in the Fuisz case. The prospect of being deposed made him nervous. He and Rochelle discussed the lawsuit several times. Rochelle had once done work as a patent attorney, so Ian asked her to review Theranos’s patent portfolio in the hope that she could give him some advice. While doing so, she noticed that Elizabeth’s name was on all the company’s patents, often in first place in the list of inventors. When Ian told her that Elizabeth’s scientific contribution had been negligible, Rochelle warned him that the patents could be invalidated if this was ever exposed. That only served to make him more agitated.

Gibbons was the Theranos chief scientist who committed suicide in 2013:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3776888/Award-winnin...

That's right. I'm not a patent lawyer, but one has told me that to be listed as an inventor, you have to be an inventor. Now, if the patent has multiple claims, you only have to be responsible for one of them.