4 ms·

My understanding is that it worked in the sense that the results were accurate. But the results were gotten by means other than what the investors/customers th

My understanding is that it worked in the sense that the results were accurate. But the results were gotten by means other than what the investors/customers thought. So the end-user patients really had no claim since they got correct results. But the companies and investors got scammed bigtime.

teraflop 5y ago
I haven't been following the trial closely, but I spent a bit of time skimming through some of the case documents a while back. The government's allegations included a bunch of supporting statements from doctors, who claimed that Theranos frequently gave their patients wildly inaccurate results. It sounds like they weren't able to convince the jury of Holmes' guilt on those charges. (IIRC, Holmes' lawyers also made the argument that it was not legally possible for her to have committed wire fraud against the patients, because any money that Theranos received would have come from their insurance companies.) Part of the difficulty is that the empirical data that would have proven how well (or poorly) the technology worked was allegedly stored in a proprietary, bespoke database. When Theranos was ordered to turn over the data to the feds for discovery, they delivered an encrypted copy, and then claimed that the encryption key was lost and the original disk arrays were unrecoverable. Both sides of the case then blamed each other for destroying the last remaining copy of the data, which made for some fun reading.
new299 5y ago
They appear to have used commercial equipment for some of their tests, but they appear to have diluted sample until the results were no longer valid. Here's one report on an invalid pregnancy test: https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/21/22687026/theranos-patient-bad-test-miscarriage-pregnancy https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/21/22687026/theranos-patient...
exdsq 5y ago
This is wrong. I read Bad Blood by John Carreyrou a few years ago and it mentions there were a lot of false results due to mishandling the blood samples (watering them down to run enough tests etc). I recommend the book if you're interested in the case.
- VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
  > there were a lot of false results due to mishandling the blood samples This doesn't hold with what was found in the trial. She was found not guilty on those counts. Just because a dude wrote it down in a book doesn't mean it's true. And the legal process found it to be, in fact, not true.
  - exdsq 5y ago
    That dude was the journalist who brought Theranos down, and if this was false Theranos wouldn’t have failed overnight like it did.
  - teraflop 5y ago
    That's not what a "not guilty" verdict means. The jury didn't find that the results given to the patients were accurate. They found that Holmes was not personally, criminally culpable for wire fraud in those cases. Wire fraud is a crime that has very specific elements, well beyond the question of how accurate the test results were.
compiler-guy 5y ago
The vast majority of results were not only not accurate, couldn't possibly have been accurate given the methods they were using to conduct the tests. This is well documented. I suggest John Carreyrou's book, _Bad Blood_, which gets into great detail on this.
- VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
  Once again, just because some dude wrote it down in a book doesn't mean it's a fact. The jury just acquitted her of those charges. Maybe they didn't the read dude's book?
  - compiler-guy 5y ago
    The jury made no judgements as to the efficacy of the tests. In fact, both the prosecution and the defense stipulated that the Theranos project was a failure. The defense even stated that "Failure is not fraud." The question before the jury was whether or not she had defrauded investors. They decided that she had. FWIW, every single firm that had medical expertise declined to invest in Theranos. They could see it had extremely minimal chance of success.

teraflop 5y ago

I haven't been following the trial closely, but I spent a bit of time skimming through some of the case documents a while back. The government's allegations included a bunch of supporting statements from doctors, who claimed that Theranos frequently gave their patients wildly inaccurate results. It sounds like they weren't able to convince the jury of Holmes' guilt on those charges. (IIRC, Holmes' lawyers also made the argument that it was not legally possible for her to have committed wire fraud against the patients, because any money that Theranos received would have come from their insurance companies.) Part of the difficulty is that the empirical data that would have proven how well (or poorly) the technology worked was allegedly stored in a proprietary, bespoke database. When Theranos was ordered to turn over the data to the feds for discovery, they delivered an encrypted copy, and then claimed that the encryption key was lost and the original disk arrays were unrecoverable. Both sides of the case then blamed each other for destroying the last remaining copy of the data, which made for some fun reading.

new299 5y ago

They appear to have used commercial equipment for some of their tests, but they appear to have diluted sample until the results were no longer valid. Here's one report on an invalid pregnancy test: https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/21/22687026/theranos-patient-bad-test-miscarriage-pregnancy https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/21/22687026/theranos-patient...

exdsq 5y ago

This is wrong. I read Bad Blood by John Carreyrou a few years ago and it mentions there were a lot of false results due to mishandling the blood samples (watering them down to run enough tests etc). I recommend the book if you're interested in the case.

VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
> there were a lot of false results due to mishandling the blood samples This doesn't hold with what was found in the trial. She was found not guilty on those counts. Just because a dude wrote it down in a book doesn't mean it's true. And the legal process found it to be, in fact, not true.
- exdsq 5y ago
  That dude was the journalist who brought Theranos down, and if this was false Theranos wouldn’t have failed overnight like it did.
- teraflop 5y ago
  That's not what a "not guilty" verdict means. The jury didn't find that the results given to the patients were accurate. They found that Holmes was not personally, criminally culpable for wire fraud in those cases. Wire fraud is a crime that has very specific elements, well beyond the question of how accurate the test results were.

compiler-guy 5y ago

The vast majority of results were not only not accurate, couldn't possibly have been accurate given the methods they were using to conduct the tests. This is well documented. I suggest John Carreyrou's book, _Bad Blood_, which gets into great detail on this.

VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
Once again, just because some dude wrote it down in a book doesn't mean it's a fact. The jury just acquitted her of those charges. Maybe they didn't the read dude's book?
- compiler-guy 5y ago
  The jury made no judgements as to the efficacy of the tests. In fact, both the prosecution and the defense stipulated that the Theranos project was a failure. The defense even stated that "Failure is not fraud." The question before the jury was whether or not she had defrauded investors. They decided that she had. FWIW, every single firm that had medical expertise declined to invest in Theranos. They could see it had extremely minimal chance of success.