[deleted]
This CEO is out for blood
41–50 of 105 posts
Re: This CEO is out for blood
#42> Her father, Christian Holmes IV, has devoted most of his life to public-minded government service–disaster relief in Africa, international development projects in China, environmental work in this country–and is currently the global water coordinator for the U.S. Agency for International Development. He met Elizabeth’s mother, Noel, on Capitol Hill, where she worked as a congressional committee staffer.
she definitely learnt a lot from her parents. At least how to navigate politically charged [mine]fields
Re: This CEO is out for blood
#43There have been hints and whispers of Theranos here at HN for a while, here at least is more information about it, puff piece or no.
The board is quite impressive; I suspect they have gotten at least some DoD money, i.e. DARPA, through which perhaps some of those connections were made...
Re: This CEO is out for blood
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I skimmed through the first part, but based on your comment I went back and read the article. > As a bonus, board meetings are also attended by the company’s de facto legal adviser at large, trial lawyer David Boies. Boies represented the DOJ in the Microsoft antitrust proceedings and Al Gore in Bush v. Gore. What an odd cast for a startup board. I wonder what connects all these people, other than all being high-prof…
Seems rather sad state of our Patent system here in the US where a 19 year old with no prior technical background, who was a Chemical Engineering student, a sophomore no less (meaning barely finished or finishing General Ed. requirements and just starting Major courses), can write and file for a highly-technical patent involving radios, sensors, embedded devices, and the like. > And we could put a cellphone chip on i…
> Seems rather sad state of our Patent system here in the US where a 19 year old with no prior technical background, who was a Chemical Engineering student, a sophomore no less (meaning barely finished or finishing General Ed. requirements and just starting Major courses), can write and file for a highly-technical patent involving radios, sensors, embedded devices, and the like.
> It's very doubtful she understood how any of that works, or would work in her product/patent.
I'm not quite sure if I understand you right, do you mean to suggest she should not be able to apply for patents because she's young or because she's a woman or both?
Re: This CEO is out for blood
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems rather sad state of our Patent system here in the US where a 19 year old with no prior technical background, who was a Chemical Engineering student, a sophomore no less (meaning barely finished or finishing General Ed. requirements and just starting Major courses), can write and file for a highly-technical patent involving radios, sensors, embedded devices, and the like. > And we could put a cellphone chip on i…
I think you're underestimating her intelligence and capabilities. Clearly she had the background and the initiative. There are super smart and dedicated people out there. She sounds like one of them. Beyond that, I'm not sure if the patent is absurd or not...but I definitely don't think its absurd for a 19 year old woman to write up and be awarded a patent.
No, I was meaning I find it highly unlikely she understood or could actually implement the technology behind her patent.
A 19 year old, no matter how smart, is not likely to have a thorough enough background to understand all of the related technologies involved in this patent. This is a medical device, and has to be "done right", or people can be injured or worse. I don't expect even a top-tier CS student could pull it off.
I'm not attempting to discredit her intelligence, just pointing out she seems to have been/is an "idea guy". We've all run into "idea guys", they'll pitch a great idea with all this elaborate stuff, but then can't execute on it without outside help. Perhaps she got help, who knows?
A patent is, more-or-less, a mere idea (which is absurd in it's own right, ideas should not be patentable imho). So, you are right, it's not "absurd for a 19 year old [gender-is-regardless] to write up and be awarded a patent", it's absurd it was patentable in the first place.
Re: This CEO is out for blood
#46Can someone help me on the technical aspects of the blood tests they've developed? The premise appears to be that they take extremely small samples ("25 to 50 microliters") and run lots of tests ("as many as 70 different tests from a single draw") using "the same fundamental chemical methods". This compares with standard blood tests which require 2 orders of magnitude more blood ("numerous tubes of blood, each contai…
Can someone help me on the technical aspects of the blood tests they've developed?
On the specifics, I'm afraid nobody can for now. They have refused to peer-review their protocols and validation data, so their assays are essentially a black box. So far, incredibly, they have managed to get away with this thanks to a glaring regulatory loophole (as the article explains); but sooner or later they'll have to open up if they want their assays to be taken seriously by the medical community.
In broader terms, however, there's been a lot of recent work in the well-established microfluidics [1] literature on whole-blood assays [2], so that can give you a good guess about how they go about their implementation: most likely some form of "lab-on-a-disk" centrifugation for plasma separation and subsequent transport to separate microfluidic optical chambers preloaded with colorimetric reagents for readout, using perhaps a digital camera and some non-kosher/black-boxy form of curve-fitting DSP to increase "sensitivity".
In all I'm very skeptical until they open up and provide peer-reviewed validation data for their assays. There are already several companies doing patented blood microfluidics like Abaxis [3] with peer-reviewed validation, and the enabling technologies have been out in the open in the literature for years, if not decades; so the whole "we are doing a super duper secret awesome thing we can't tell you anything about" sounds rather D-Wavey and fishy to me.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microfluidics
Re: This CEO is out for blood
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I skimmed through the first part, but based on your comment I went back and read the article. > As a bonus, board meetings are also attended by the company’s de facto legal adviser at large, trial lawyer David Boies. Boies represented the DOJ in the Microsoft antitrust proceedings and Al Gore in Bush v. Gore. What an odd cast for a startup board. I wonder what connects all these people, other than all being high-prof…
Seems rather sad state of our Patent system here in the US where a 19 year old with no prior technical background, who was a Chemical Engineering student, a sophomore no less (meaning barely finished or finishing General Ed. requirements and just starting Major courses), can write and file for a highly-technical patent involving radios, sensors, embedded devices, and the like. > And we could put a cellphone chip on i…
Seems like a rather sad state of Hacker News when there is so much doubt heaped on a woman's technical ability just because of her age, and the fact she was unlikely to have completed the relevant formal education.
There is rarely an invention 101. Many people can teach themselves.
Re: This CEO is out for blood
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems rather sad state of our Patent system here in the US where a 19 year old with no prior technical background, who was a Chemical Engineering student, a sophomore no less (meaning barely finished or finishing General Ed. requirements and just starting Major courses), can write and file for a highly-technical patent involving radios, sensors, embedded devices, and the like. > And we could put a cellphone chip on i…
> Seems rather sad state of our Patent system here in the US where a 19 year old with no prior technical background, who was a Chemical Engineering student, a sophomore no less (meaning barely finished or finishing General Ed. requirements and just starting Major courses), can write and file for a highly-technical patent involving radios, sensors, embedded devices, and the like. > It's very doubtful she understood ho…
I'm really not sure why you are attempting to make this a gender issue.
If you re-read my comment, gender is not even approached.
To summarize my post - I was making a statement regarding how absurd (imho) it is that someone can patent something they are not technically capable of even implementing. It is patentable because here in the US, patents are really just "ideas", so you don't have to actually implement the patent, just think it up. I doubt a 19 year old sophomore chemical engineering student would have the technical background to actually implement this patent... alluding to, she was just another "idea guy".
Re: This CEO is out for blood
#49Can someone help me on the technical aspects of the blood tests they've developed? The premise appears to be that they take extremely small samples ("25 to 50 microliters") and run lots of tests ("as many as 70 different tests from a single draw") using "the same fundamental chemical methods". This compares with standard blood tests which require 2 orders of magnitude more blood ("numerous tubes of blood, each contai…
Can someone help me on the technical aspects of the blood tests they've developed? On the specifics, I'm afraid nobody can for now. They have refused to peer-review their protocols and validation data, so their assays are essentially a black box. So far, incredibly, they have managed to get away with this thanks to a glaring regulatory loophole (as the article explains); but sooner or later they'll have to open up if…
It's not fishy, it's just a business strategy rather than a tech strategy.
They have a couple microfluidics assays that are profitable and they suspect these might be patent encumbered (even beyond the troll that they have already brought into the fold by giving him a board position.). Secrecy buys them two things:
1. Their competitors won't know what their loss leaders are. If assays A,B, and C have been optimized to profitability but D and E are still loss leaders, a competitor could use that knowledge by subsidizing demand for D and E (e.g. by undercutting them and forwarding the assay work, whereby the competitor spends $1 to force them to spend $10).
2. Patent trolls (are they really trolls if they spent money to develop the technology and make a product based on it?) won't know what to sue them for.
Re: This CEO is out for blood
#50> “I realized that I could have just as well been looking into the eyes of a Steve Jobs or a Bill Gates.” > Though Theranos is largely unknown even in Silicon Valley, that is about to change. > Precisely how Theranos accomplishes all these amazing feats is a trade secret. > The analyzers look like large desktop computer towers. Holmes declines to explain how they work, or even allow them to be photographed, citing th…
I skimmed through the first part, but based on your comment I went back and read the article. > As a bonus, board meetings are also attended by the company’s de facto legal adviser at large, trial lawyer David Boies. Boies represented the DOJ in the Microsoft antitrust proceedings and Al Gore in Bush v. Gore. What an odd cast for a startup board. I wonder what connects all these people, other than all being high-prof…
Her father. Holmes comes from a very wealthy and prominent family. Her father, Christian Holmes IV, has had many high ranking jobs in government. I'm assuming the board was built from his numerous government and family wealth connections.
Coming from wealth doesn't hurt but somehow the articles always leave that bit out ...