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I agree that not committing fraud would have gotten her into less legal trouble, but I don't know how much funding she would have got with that approach. Her wh

I agree that not committing fraud would have gotten her into less legal trouble, but I don't know how much funding she would have got with that approach. Her whole scam was that she was the blond steve jobs of biotech. She needed to promise a "revolutionary" product was possible soon to keep that image alive.

mrtksn 6y ago
She failed to keep the machine churning. She was not likeable and banked on being paddled by people with their own agenda(people who advocate for the women in business). She didn't have to be fraud, had she acted smarter IMHO.
- cedilla 6y ago
  The problem though is that what she was selling was complete fantasy. Tesla raised some eyebrows over whether they would be able to produce faster, better and cheaper, but the product Theranos had didn't even exist with higher costs or quality control issues; it simply was inexistant. Theranos was fraud from beginning to end. They literally tested samples on Siemens machines and pretended that their own machines did the analysis.
  - mrtksn 6y ago
    I don't think that it was complete fantasy but unsolved Engineering problem. It's not like she promised something unscientific like faster than speed travel or free energy device. Also, Tesla too failed on cost and quality control issues until they stopped failing. Yes, she apparently faked the tests but faking till making is nothing new in SV. With all that money, she could have bought a manufacturer or lease buy and rebrand from Siemens by adding something on the top of it. Many big names start by acquiring their parts from OEMs. She could have build on top of some less known European company that sucks at the software UX, for example and keep kicking the can down for the one one drop blood tests. When asked what is going on, give a presentation about the challanges and about the work you did and say that it's going to be ready in 2 years.
    - nradov 6y ago
      Theranos's whole product concept was unscientific and far more than just an unsolved engineering problem. It is biologically impossible to get accurate results on most assays from a single finger prick drop of blood. That can work reasonably well for a few things like glucose level or positive/negative on antibodies but generally it's a dead end.
      - mrtksn 6y ago
        You need to add "with the current technology" at the end, and the statement will be accurate. You can't know what a research will bring, maybe it will be discovered that you can do all these tests through some proxy measurement etc. In biology they don't deal with "laws of nature" in the same sense with the physicist, therefore everything is engineering problem since you always have the option to go above or below the biological processes. You can't transplant a heart until you find a way to do it, you can't change genes until you find a way to do it. There's no natural law prohibiting measuring something something from the finger that can be measured from somewhere else, it simply cannot be done with the current methods due to some process going on in the human body. The task would be to find a way around the mechanism that is preventing you doing it.
        nradov 6y ago
        You have misunderstood the basic biology. This is not a technology issue. For most blood assays the necessary analytes are simply not present in a single finger prick drop of blood at levels that consistently correlate with venous levels. This is pretty much a law of nature and no amount of engineering or research will alter that reality.
        mrtksn 6y ago
        Sounds like an engineering issue. I doubt that it's random, therefore other signals could be used to estimate at good enough accuracy. Maybe combining it with saliva or urine samples or finding a correlation with the existence or levels other chemicals etc. can give it away.
  - jjeaff 6y ago
    It was worse than just using siemens machines and claiming they were doing it with their own. They were taking small amounts of blood, too small for the siemens machines and then diluting it down to increase the volume. So not only were they passing it off as if it was their own machines, but they were providing inaccurate test results leading to incorrect diagnosis. And I can't believe they got as far as they did with the scam because lots of experts were saying what she was claiming was not possible. Because a drop of blood is simply not large enough to get a statistical result for most things tested. It doesn't matter how amazing or sensitive your machinery is, you can't give a correct result if you simply don't have a large enough sample.

mrtksn 6y ago

She failed to keep the machine churning. She was not likeable and banked on being paddled by people with their own agenda(people who advocate for the women in business). She didn't have to be fraud, had she acted smarter IMHO.

cedilla 6y ago
The problem though is that what she was selling was complete fantasy. Tesla raised some eyebrows over whether they would be able to produce faster, better and cheaper, but the product Theranos had didn't even exist with higher costs or quality control issues; it simply was inexistant. Theranos was fraud from beginning to end. They literally tested samples on Siemens machines and pretended that their own machines did the analysis.
- mrtksn 6y ago
  I don't think that it was complete fantasy but unsolved Engineering problem. It's not like she promised something unscientific like faster than speed travel or free energy device. Also, Tesla too failed on cost and quality control issues until they stopped failing. Yes, she apparently faked the tests but faking till making is nothing new in SV. With all that money, she could have bought a manufacturer or lease buy and rebrand from Siemens by adding something on the top of it. Many big names start by acquiring their parts from OEMs. She could have build on top of some less known European company that sucks at the software UX, for example and keep kicking the can down for the one one drop blood tests. When asked what is going on, give a presentation about the challanges and about the work you did and say that it's going to be ready in 2 years.
  - nradov 6y ago
    Theranos's whole product concept was unscientific and far more than just an unsolved engineering problem. It is biologically impossible to get accurate results on most assays from a single finger prick drop of blood. That can work reasonably well for a few things like glucose level or positive/negative on antibodies but generally it's a dead end.
    - mrtksn 6y ago
      You need to add "with the current technology" at the end, and the statement will be accurate. You can't know what a research will bring, maybe it will be discovered that you can do all these tests through some proxy measurement etc. In biology they don't deal with "laws of nature" in the same sense with the physicist, therefore everything is engineering problem since you always have the option to go above or below the biological processes. You can't transplant a heart until you find a way to do it, you can't change genes until you find a way to do it. There's no natural law prohibiting measuring something something from the finger that can be measured from somewhere else, it simply cannot be done with the current methods due to some process going on in the human body. The task would be to find a way around the mechanism that is preventing you doing it.
      - nradov 6y ago
        You have misunderstood the basic biology. This is not a technology issue. For most blood assays the necessary analytes are simply not present in a single finger prick drop of blood at levels that consistently correlate with venous levels. This is pretty much a law of nature and no amount of engineering or research will alter that reality.
        mrtksn 6y ago
        Sounds like an engineering issue. I doubt that it's random, therefore other signals could be used to estimate at good enough accuracy. Maybe combining it with saliva or urine samples or finding a correlation with the existence or levels other chemicals etc. can give it away.
- jjeaff 6y ago
  It was worse than just using siemens machines and claiming they were doing it with their own. They were taking small amounts of blood, too small for the siemens machines and then diluting it down to increase the volume. So not only were they passing it off as if it was their own machines, but they were providing inaccurate test results leading to incorrect diagnosis. And I can't believe they got as far as they did with the scam because lots of experts were saying what she was claiming was not possible. Because a drop of blood is simply not large enough to get a statistical result for most things tested. It doesn't matter how amazing or sensitive your machinery is, you can't give a correct result if you simply don't have a large enough sample.