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The Tale of Theranos and the Mysterious Fire Alarm
- plink 9y agoEveryone there too rich for jailtime?
- megadeth 9y agoNot deserving of jail time: VC funded, Charismatic founder with a fraudulent business.
- jannotti 9y agoHow is financial fraud not deserving of jail time?
- marnett 9y agoI believe it was sarcasm. However, she most certainly is deserving of jail time; may Shkreli's precedent of $~19 million fraud and 7 years pave the way for Holmes. All ratios equal, the sentence should be ~270 years, naturally. Unfortunately, because she is well connected to the VC folks, the $750 million and Ian Gibbons life will all go without retribution.
- EpicEng 9y agoWe have no idea where the DOJ is going to land on this yet.
- danso 9y agoSomeone needs to make an anthology of first-person stories about trying out Theranos. I actually thought the OP article was by John Carreyrou because I saw it in his tweets (and it makes sense that they'd pull the fire alarm upon seeing him), but it's by a reporter (Jenny Gold) from Kaiser Health News, who apparently visited there (Nov 2014) before Carreyrou's WSJ investigation was published in October 2015. The only other stories I can think of are: Eric Lakin (DeciBio Consulting), 10/2015: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/27/what-happened-when-i-tried-the-new-blood-test-that-was-supposed-to-change-the-world/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/27/what-... Jean-Louis Gassee (former Apple exec), 10/2015: https://mondaynote.com/theranos-trouble-a-first-person-account-1690b827539f https://mondaynote.com/theranos-trouble-a-first-person-accou... Melia Robinson (Business Insider), 10/2015: http://www.businessinsider.com/i-tried-theranos-2015-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/i-tried-theranos-2015-10
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- wpietri 9y agoI would also love to see a survey of the journalism on this. We see now that Theranos's stuff never worked. But tech press is famously uncritical. It seems like there's an opportunity for all of us to learn something here about how we were so easily misled.
- nathanaldensr 9y agoMany people were skeptical, even right here on HN. Sometimes, their voices are drowned out by those that like to accuse the skeptical of being pessimistic. Optimism can be inherently unscientific--it can often be a manifestation of what we want rather than what is scientifically likely. To me, the battle has always been between optimism and realism.
- danso 9y agoThe seems to be the oldest post on HN (Sept 8 2013, 211 upvotes, 113 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349349 It doesn't feel that much more skeptical than typical HN threads about new companies. And skepticism/confusion was going to be more prevalent given how few HN users (relatively speaking) are in the health field. Funny enough, if you scroll down far enough, you run into a comment that sounds like it came from a prophet. Or someone experienced in the field: > The company is all hot air. They have a board full of retired military figure heads that have no experience in medical devices or retail services. Additionally, they do not have any products to show. Look at their patents. They are all very general and broad. There has been NO FDA CLEARANCE for anything they are doing, which raises legal questions. Speaking of legal, search for lawsuits they are involved in. Their core technology is not even theirs. They stole it from someone else. That the board was heavy DC/military was well-known, or at least public. But I don't think it was well known that Theranos was heavily reliant on using other technology. Sadly, that Theranos critique came from a one-use throwaway account. So likely an insider (or jealous competitor)?
- PhilWright 9y agoIt is good to see the reporter refused to go along with the PR people from Theranos. But I am surprised they did not still report on the experience and point out that no-one could be found having the pin prick test and that the PR people acting suspiciously. Surely that is a story in itself?
- ghaff 9y agoI don’t know the exact circumstances but lack of any real info, apparently suspicious behavior, etc. may trigger spidey senses but (properly) don’t usually trigger a story in a major pub. Unfortunately that can lead to situations where lots of people are pretty sure that something isn’t quite right without triggering an article. But it’s mostly the way news should operate.
- zer0day 9y agoI started to write a thoughtful and balanced analysis of this article...but then I stopped myself. The reason I stopped myself is that I thought about all the journalists like this lady who played the same game with Theranos and continue to play similar games with all of the rotten corporate and government entities in the county. Then I started getting genuinely pissed off! What. the. f*ck did I just read? She openly admits to the following: 1. She came to the story with a predetermined framing of the story. 2. She allowed herself to be bribed with the “treat” of talking to Elizabeth Holmes and then backed off under threat and misdirection while pretending to be immune to such behavior. 3. She sat on the story because she couldn’t spin it the way she had intended in advance and allowed herself to be threatened. I am not exaggerating, she literally writes “I lost the story so I moved on...” Lost the story directly translates to: “I knew what I wanted to report and what would get clicks, I didn’t get that so I gave up.” 4. She proudly presents this article years after the fact pretending to retroactively have known something was wrong...and to have maintained her journalistic ethics while openly admitting to dropping the story once it didn’t fit the framing she hoped to apply to it. 5. She waited until well after the tide of public opinion had turned against Theranos to capitalize on the work of others who actually did the hard journalism to get clicks. This lady should be fired, she is not a journalist. Why should we give her a pass when hundreds of other fake journalists did exactly the same with Theranos? When do we all say: “Enough is enough?” This is everything wrong with American media in one article, the attempts to feign journalistic ethics after the fact while generating more clicks is sickening. People died from Theranos!
- ipsum2 9y agoWhile I agree with you, there aren't any known case of people dying from Theranos: https://www.quora.com/Did-people-die-from-relying-on-Theranos-inaccurate-blood-testing-device https://www.quora.com/Did-people-die-from-relying-on-Therano...
- perl4ever 9y agoYou just linked to someone who states (a) statistically, there must have been deaths from faulty tests, and (b) quotes a lawsuit over the negative health consequences of the tests. It doesn't seem like your link jibes with your dismissive comment, not in spirit, nor in a strict technical sense.
- dpandya 9y agoOne of the most concerning aspects of the Theranos investment has been the total lack of due diligence in this process. Putting aside the technology for a moment (it could be considered difficult to evaluate for most investors), due diligence failed on multiple counts. For example, Holmes told potential investors they had over $100 million in revenue when, in reality, they had close to $100,000 in revenue. That's a bit like trying to tell someone a SMB SaaS business with ~100 customers has the same traction as, say, Algolia. Hard to understand how this passed through the filters.
- Thriptic 9y agoThere is a far simpler way to look at this, and that is to say that this is why we have peer review in science. If a scientist won't release data or methods, there is a 99% chance they are bullshitting their claims. Theranos's product happened to be adjacent to my research space, so I was already highly skeptical when I heard the initial product claims. When I heard they weren't releasing data however, I strongly suspected they were bullshit. Many years later, sure enough..
- nemild 9y agoIf it's useful for anyone, I made a list of all the ways engineering media can be manipulated (including journalists): https://github.com/nemild/hacking-engineers https://github.com/nemild/hacking-engineers I added this example to it since it's a particularly good example of how marketing/PR uses threats of access and cherry picked demo sessions to get their favored view out. (Contributions welcome)
- whoisjuan 9y agoQuestion. When are companies open positions with title names like "Growth Hacker, are" is their expectation to find someone who would deploy this kind of tactics? I ask because it seems that there's a line of thought that wants to legitimize some of these behaviors (voting rings, for instance.)
- nemild 9y agoYou're absolutely right, that's often the intent. I approached my project with the hope of creating antibodies that makes those techniques less valuable. Or at minimal, help a few people better understand the incentives/techniques behind what they're seeing.
- hristov 9y agoThat is a heartening example of good journalism. But nevertheless, there is one thing that I did not like with the way Ms Gold handled the story. She had an idea in mind of what kind of story she was going to write, and when reality did not pan out according to her plan, she just decided not to write the story. If she had written about her experience she would have had a very important story and could have saved investors hundreds of millions of dollars.
- oh_sigh 9y agoGood journalism? The story was nixed after the claims of the company couldn't be verified. This story - as is published now - would have been even better published years ago, when it was only suspected and not known that Theranos was a fraud.
- prawn 9y agoOr the investors could've delved deeper with their due diligence? Should a journalist be more useful to the public before they're a shortcut for people trying to make more money? (Unless there were small time investors wrapped up in bigger funds who also should've done more research.)
- GavinMcG 9y agoThe problem is she didn't necessarily have a story there, either, at least without an order of magnitude more research, at a minimum. She went in for a light piece humanizing a new technology. Do you really expect her to shift gears into a massive fraud, with nothing more than weird PR pressure and a fire alarm?
- swang 9y agocome on. this is the post of a person who has a bit of a hindsight bias. if only she published this article the wsj wouldn't have had to publish theirs and theranos would have been immediately outed! or... maybe she writes this story. says something to the effect of, "Hmm a bit WEIRD? What's Theranos hiding?" and then all the VCs and tech people start accusing her of having an agenda against Theranos. without any hindsight, what is the story?
- CptFribble 9y agoHere's something that Theranos was deliberately misleading about: how many tests can be done on one prick's worth of blood? Before the downfall, the website claimed that hundreds of tests could be performed with a single drop of blood. But, is that hundreds of tests on one single drop at once? Or is it one test per drop? Squeezing dozens of blood drops out of multiple pricks would not be easy or painless. Nowhere on the website, or in any press releases, or in any interviews that I could find, did Theranos clarify this. If they could do 100+ tests on a single drop of whole blood it would be a revolution, and there would be no reason to hide it. But, if it was one 4-hour test per drop, that's actually worse than current state of the art, and they would have every reason to hide it. This is one of the things that would have been clear if journalists had spent more time talking to lab experts, rather than Theranos' PR and laypeople in their offices.
- incompatible 9y agoTheranos was claiming amazing technical breakthroughs, but never published anything that would verify the claims. This was pointed out by a couple of researchers, Eleftherios Diamandis and John Ioannidis, in early 2015. https://www.vox.com/2015/10/31/9646356/theranos-peer-review-evidence https://www.vox.com/2015/10/31/9646356/theranos-peer-review-...
- bsder 9y agoThe problem, which people in medicine know full well, was the fact that blood is highly variable depending upon when and where you take it. It's why you have to take so much to get decent lab results. A "fingerprick" was always going to be ferociously unstable. It could have had value if taken repeatedly. I would be far more inclined to monitor myself if I had to only give a drop every 3-4 days. That way you could spot trends. However, that was never going to produce a unicorn.
- misiti3780 9y agoI have an honest question, what is the end game for Theranos employees. My understanding is the company is a complete fraud but yet if I go on linkedin they still have 200+ employees working there: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?facetCurrentCompany=%5B%2230702%22%5D https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?facetCurrent... are all of these people going to be fired in the coming months or do investors think this is still a good idea but Holmes isnt going to be apart of it ?
- baldajan 9y agoI think at this point, investors are trying to salvage what ever tech it has, and sell the company. No clue why employees are sticking around, maybe they’re currently looking for another job and it’s a slow drop to zero.
- nikanj 9y agoA mortgage is a mortgage, and a pay check is a pay check.
- meddevthrowaway 9y agoEmployees are looking around. I've interviewed more of them than I can count. At this point most of the good people are gone.
- perl4ever 9y agoIt seems like a long time ago it was publicized they were a complete fraud and I was bewildered as to why they weren't being shut down and/or having people arrested. So I have no idea what's going on except that things may go slower than one expects.
- ballenf 9y agoThere are huge margins in the lab business using traditional techniques after high upfront capital expenses. Maybe they're just fulfilling contracts using traditional testing methods?
- redsummer 9y agoBlonde Female CEO = tech goggles for rich old men.
- TaylorGood 9y agoI wouldn't put it past Theranos. They have shown their playbook includes filth. Ask an investor if it would surprise them: "oh s%^t we didn't stop the journalist, pull the fire alarm"
- jonathanyc 9y agoIs there an industry of “black hat PR” people that handle this sort of thing? Would be really interested if there were any autobiographical novels from that sort of person, though I suppose, like bank robbers, their success insists they remain unknown. EDIT: Just remembered the movie Wag the Dog the Wikipedia article calls the black hat PR people portrayed therein “spin doctors”. But that seems more like just PR to me, not setting off fire alarms to scare away reporters (though the spin doctors in the movie construct a fake war). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wag_the_Dog https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wag_the_Dog
- ryacko 9y agoDirty tricks.
- chillwaves 9y agoRead the news lately? https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/21/17141428/cambridge-analytica-trump-russia-mueller https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/21/17141428/c...
- solidsnack9000 9y agoIt’s the stack of a few individually explainable things — no one getting the finger-prick test, a complaint you’ve never received before, unusual requests to delete things, a fire alarm at just the right time — that makes them all suspicious.