Skip to main content

Some developments in the Holmes/Theranos trial


By most accounts, Elizabeth Holmes' trial for the scam she called "Theranos" is now about half over. 

The trial has not gone entirely smoothly. The number of alternative jurors is getting low, in part because one of the alternates seemed more interested in Soduko than in the testimony. 

This is ironic in the sense of combining "who would have thought" with "it figgers." 

Soduko is a crossword puzzle for 'numbers people.' If that juror is a numbers person, Theranos seems likely to have been the near-perfect trial for them! Yet they missed it. Playing a game with numbers rather than grappling with those the real world provides. 

Here's a number: $100 million. That's how much Lisa Peterson put into Theranos on behalf of the DeVos family.  Lisa Peterson is an investment manager for the DeVos' family office. Think of Tom Hagen, who in The Godfather runs a law practice entirely for the Corleone Family. Peterson is the IM equivalent. 

Betsy DeVos was not yet a cabinet member when the family made this investment. But she was well known in Republican circles, in the Michigan Republican Party especially (she was its chair in the late 1990s), and she had married well. She had married the son of the founder of Amway, the paradigmatic multi-level marketing company. 

So, people who got rich through what is in effect a giant pyramid scheme later lost some of that money to a different kind of fraud, a sort of bait-and-switch scheme? 

You can miss a lot of fun sticking your head in those Soduko books.

By the way, the above photo has become ubiquitous in discussions of this case. You might be asking yourself, as I was the first few times I saw it: what is the gesture Holmes is making? Is that an 
okay" sign?

No: Holmes is holding a "nanotainer." These were the very small containers that, Theranos claimed, could hold all the blood necessary for their machine to perform a wide range of tests. 

Bit of trivia: there was briefly a trademark registration dispute between Theranos and a medical supply firm called Becton Dickinson, which makes the microtainer. The parties settled before the shit really hit the fan for the marketers of the nanotainer. 

 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more