Why are there random pictures of tools in this article?
To serve as a “de-glamourising” antidote.
Theranos Founder Faces a Test of Technology, and Reputation
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Re: Theranos Founder Faces a Test of Technology, and Reputation
#32If i post an article on Hacker News,it wont make front page.But if someone else posts the very same article many hours later,it will
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10764636
Talk of double standard.
Re: Theranos Founder Faces a Test of Technology, and Reputation
#33Why are there random pictures of tools in this article?
It's incredibly telling that the only thing the NYT was allowed to photograph was the machine shop.
Re: Theranos Founder Faces a Test of Technology, and Reputation
#34If i post an article on Hacker News,it wont make front page.But if someone else posts the very same article many hours later,it will https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10764636 Talk of double standard.
Or you just posted mid-afternoon in the Americas and fairly late evening in Europe, instead of hitting American prime time right on the nose... :)
Re: Theranos Founder Faces a Test of Technology, and Reputation
#35The idea of rapid disruption in the healthcare industry makes me uncomfortable for some reason. I admire Holmes's ambition and in interviews I've watched she seems competent and well guided but something just doesn't seem to add up. How was a college dropout able to get a break in the healthcare sector? Becoming a doctor requires years of education and training and along comes this young woman who just decides "I'm g…
Perhaps I just don't understand the phobia that some people have around blood tests but it is my understanding that you get a blood test as a way to gauge your health, not because it makes you feel nice. The hold up doesn't seem to be that tons of people are afraid of needles otherwise they would be getting tested all the time. The hold up to people getting blood tests all the time is that doctors don't order them, presumably because doctors don't think people need them. As long as the test isn't extremely uncomfortable for the patient, I would think that accuracy is really the only measure of quality for a test and it seems to me that they are willing to sacrifice accuracy in favor of making people feel comfortable.
Couple of potential issues: one is that blood tests can be extremely expensive. They are run by delicate, temperamental, and pricy analyzers that have to be babysat by reasonably well-trained personnel. Some tests need costly reagents. Still others aren't readily automated at all and require a lot of manual inspection and interpretation, again by people who don't work for free. Meanwhile, doctors are under external pressure to keep costs down, sometimes to a fault. I think these are the pain points that Theranos is trying to address.
The second issue is the real elephant in the room: statistics. Accuracy is not a simple concept in this business. If Theranos succeeds in commoditizing a large number of blood tests and making them available to people without medical supervision, there will be some unintended consequences. I think these are positive goals -- don't get me wrong -- but the fact is that the traditional medical priesthood is still going to be needed to follow up on the tests. If you run enough lab tests on a sample of your own blood, you will get some positive results for diseases you don't have. A test that's 99.9% accurate for say, HIV, is going to report a lot of false positives if you give the test to people who were never in a high-risk demographic to begin with.
So when a physician decides which tests should be ordered and which ones should be skipped, they aren't just being financially stingy. They're also trying to get at the most likely diagnosis without wasting time on laboratory snipe hunts. I don't think anyone including Theranos can do much about this problem. It's just too hard to come up with a perfect medical test, let alone a perfect machine to execute it.
Re: Theranos Founder Faces a Test of Technology, and Reputation
#36The images in this article are awful: generic shots and captions of a machine shop; a (possibly empty) black box that's supposed to be a testing machine. Where are the actual machines doing the tests? Where's the science?
Re: Theranos Founder Faces a Test of Technology, and Reputation
#37In my opinion, Holmes is a fanatic. This is subtly different from being fanatical or obsessive about certain things, which is probably a good or even necessary characteristic for a founder.
She seem to just be a fanatic. She has found a mission, and is pursuing it without any second thoughts. Never mind whether anybody else thinks that the mission is actually that important... Fanatics have the ability to impress those close to them, because of their overriding zeal. From a distance though, they seem crazy and somewhat deficient human beings.
I'm not sure that fanatics do science well, or handle other people's money that well either....
Re: Theranos Founder Faces a Test of Technology, and Reputation
#38The images in this article are awful: generic shots and captions of a machine shop; a (possibly empty) black box that's supposed to be a testing machine. Where are the actual machines doing the tests? Where's the science?
The main topic of the article is about how Theranos won't share any info about the science or about the machines. So that's probably all the NYT has to work with.
Re: Theranos Founder Faces a Test of Technology, and Reputation
#39Why are all these articles about Holmes' personality?
Because she refuses to talk specifics about the technology. And the subtext is that Theranos has been able to attract such a high valuation based on her personality even when the technology isn't apparently there.
Also, have you looked at Theranos website? She is just.. everywhere.
Re: Theranos Founder Faces a Test of Technology, and Reputation
#40> Dr. Bill Frist, the former Senate majority leader from Tennessee who joined Theranos as a director last year, supports Ms. Holmes and asserts that “the data I have seen speaks.” But he also points out that the Theranos story has taken on the cast of a vicious political campaign and there’s nothing more appealing than watching a front-runner fall from grace. This is ridiculous. A lifetime politician accuses other cl…
As a med student, Bill Frist adopted cats from animal shelters under false pretenses so he could experiment on them, sometimes fatally. Definitely a good fit!