There’s a lot of research money in microfluidics. It has huge potential to revolutionise an awful lot of the tedious time consuming laboratory work in health ca

There’s a lot of research money in microfluidics. It has huge potential to revolutionise an awful lot of the tedious time consuming laboratory work in health care. Instead of painstakingly pipetting samples into well plates all day, trains of thousands of droplets can be fed into the microfluidic conveyor belt and processed accurately and automatically. It can work very well. I once worked in a startup that was able to achieve exactly this however it was enormously challenging. The core technology was developed in a university and eventually spun out. Then it grew into something much larger as fully functional systems were developed for customers. The cost was enormous and the reliability not particularly fantastic but the customer was thrilled with the potential. Eventually we were bought out and while I took another path colleagues formed another hugely successful startup. There are many many similar stories just like this in this space. Holmes it seems was a highly effective pretender wanting to leapfrog the research she would have glimpsed while at Stanford by promising something that could do it all. So the money rolled in and she no doubt hired good technical people but instead of building something, anything worthwhile she doubled down on the lie.