Skip to main content

Theranos

Theranos Logo.svg

I've recently read a book about the rise and fall of Theranos, the privately held Silicon Valley firm headed by Elizabeth Holmes.

The story that author John Carryrou tells in his book, BAD BLOOD, spans the period from the company's founding in 2003 to the lab inspection failures in 2016 that finally broke the back of investor patience with Holmes.

As the title of Carryrou's book hints, the story is about blood testing. Theranos sold itself to investors, and in time to retailers, as the manufacturer of a brilliant new machine that was small and simple enough for ordinary people to have in their own homes and use on themselves, that was capable of doing a wide range of blood tests from very small quantities of the vital liquid. It would have been a great medical breakthrough. If it had been real. It was all -- or nearly all -- a sham.

At the company's peak, two giant retail chains contracted to sell the miraculous mini-labs: Safeway and Walgreen's.

I recommend the book. There are a number of lessons in it: about the pharmaceutical industry, about "fear of missing out" as a business phenomenon, about charismatic business leadership, even about gender politics. It can also be read as a novel, with all the conflict and animosity in it that one might guess from the other side of Carryrou's gently punning title.

Just one word more. On gender politics, it does seem to me that much of the world is overly eager for stories of women who "break glass ceilings." Elizabeth Holmes was to all appearances a tech entrepreneur creating her own company around an industry-disrupting invention -- a female Steve Jobs -- and she cunningly sold herself that way. The dynamics would have played out very differently had it had an Ian Holmes at the center.

I am reminded of the way the Trump administration patted itself on its back for elevating a woman to head the CIA. Our torturer in chief now reports directly to our commander-in-chief. What a wonderful victory for womankind!!!

A con artist is somewhat higher on the moral food chain than a torturer, but neither is raised any higher than it would be otherwise by being the "first woman to" do this or pretend to do that.




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