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Her only problem was that she fell off the runway before she had a chance to take off. Some engineers I spoke with told me she was 2 years before her big breakt

Her only problem was that she fell off the runway before she had a chance to take off. Some engineers I spoke with told me she was 2 years before her big breakthru. At the end of the day no difference between Holmes being over-promising on blood testing, and Musk over-promising with your Tesla being a robotaxi that makes you $30,000 profit a year, by driving fully autonomously inside a vast network of underground 3D tunnels at speeds of 150 mph.

jacquesm 5y ago
> Some engineers I spoke with told me she was 2 years before her big breakthru. That's pretty gullible given her history to date. 2 years before a breakthrough spells 'never', that's exactly how the rest of the investors got bilked.
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
Did these "some engineers" get their degree from a crackerjack box? Holmes was always full of shit, and a "big breakthru" in this area is impossible, as there is ample evidence that capillary blood at these volumes is simply not homogeneous enough to give accurate results for quantitative tests.
- joering2 5y ago
  Impossible with todays technology. When Musk was initially pitching electric car, everyone was laughing because back then the batteries density made it impossible for battery to be lightweight enough to be carried in a normal sized car. And look where we are today... Let's revisit Holmes claims in 15 years. Unless you want to argue that there will never be any progress made in terms of blood tests???
  - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    Not sure why I'm feeding the trolls, but anyway: > everyone was laughing because back then the batteries density made it impossible for battery to be lightweight enough to be carried in a normal sized car. That's simply untrue. The issue was always recognized to be economic, not a physical impossibility issue. There were a bunch of (crappy) electric cars in the 90s. With respect to Theranos, impossible as in it is physically impossible, because of the non-homogeneity of capillary blood. It simply doesn't matter how good your blood test is, if you are doing a quantitative test, for many types of tests you can simply not get good enough accuracy doing a finger prick test.
    - joering2 5y ago
    - fastball 5y ago
      When you said the 90s, did you mean the 1890s? If so, you would be correct.
    - CamperBob2 5y ago
      With respect to Theranos, impossible as in it is physically impossible, because of the non-homogeneity of capillary blood. It simply doesn't matter how good your blood test is, if you are doing a quantitative test, for many types of tests you can simply not get good enough accuracy doing a finger prick test. The crazy thing is, you don't have to consult biomedical engineers or pore over leading-edge research papers to discover this. You just need to ask almost any med tech with a modicum of experience with blood tests. They will tell you, in no uncertain terms, that Blood Does Not Work That Way. I will never understand the lack of due diligence performed by the Theranos investors. There couldn't possibly have been any due diligence at all. It's very hard to avoid slipping into victim-blaming mode in any conversation about this company.
  - austinjp 5y ago
    You've leapt from 2 years to 15 years, I notice. And "blood tests" vs tests of capillary blood is a big difference.
    - joering2 5y ago
      Because of injustice that happened to Holmes (mostly because she is a woman; man promising all kind of crap never delivering have been given pass many times before - see Musk track record for reference), nobody is going to touch blood testing for a very long time. Hence 15 years.
      - MattGaiser 5y ago
        There is a difference between promising all sorts of stuff and making claims about what is already fact. Holmes ran afoul of the latter. Her claim was not that the machines will work. She could have freely made that claim. She fraudulently claimed that the machines did work.
      - copo233 5y ago
      - kuhewa 5y ago
        I can only guess you aren't actually familiar with Holmes' claims.
      - TylerE 5y ago
        She didn't suffer injustice for being a woman. She received justice for being a charlatan.
  - copo233 5y ago
    You can't call dibs on any future progress in a field.
    - kordlessagain 5y ago
      That's a thing nowadays. Trevor Noah talked about this type of biased thinking recently. While it is true there may be a machine in the future that can do what Holmes claimed, there are still people who worked at the company who claimed it was impossible due to our current understanding of the laws of physics.
      - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
        > While it is true there may be a machine in the future that can do what Holmes claimed No, there won't. I feel the need to keep repeating this because for some reason many people seem to conflate "it is not possible with current technology" with "it is a physical impossibility". Doing accurate quantitative blood tests with a finger prick is a physical impossibility. All that said, one thing that made me especially mad about Theranos is that a lot of their ideas, e.g. one small, portable machine that can run tons of tests; simplified, consumer-accessible pricing; access at neighborhood pharmacies, etc., had a ton of value even if accomplished with venous blood draws. But instead Holmes' delusions of grandeur forced her to hang everything on the fraudulent, and impossible, "must be done with a finger prick" idea.
        kordlessagain 5y ago
        I said may be. What is impossible is to negate a "maybe". While there may be physical limitation now, that doesn't mean there will be later. New understandings of physics may change that, as would new technology that wouldn't normally be researched along a given path to an idea or need (like a very small machine operating on very small samples). For example, we may find a way to use neutrinos to detect things we didn't know we could detect before, because someone theorized that doing XYZ with neutrenos allows us to detect them. That "discovery" (hypothetical) could then be repurposed to build a small machine that does what Holmes thought it could. Not that she thought about stuff like that - she was designing their stupid building instead. The point I was making was that not knowing now and then saying will will know later at which point "someone becomes right" is a biased way of thinking. My point was not to say there will or won't be, which is why I used "may be".
  - withinboredom 5y ago
    And battery density still hasn’t changed much since then, despite him claiming we are always just a year away from doubling it. Sounds familiar…
kuhewa 5y ago
Were the engineers from the future?
axutio 5y ago
Holmes wasn't just making lofty promises about the future capabilities of her technology, she was lying about its current capabilities to investors and using unreliable diagnostic tools to provide patients with test results that were frequently wrong - real patients experienced real harm as a result. The better analogy would be Musk indiscriminately enabling full self-driving in every Model 3, claiming its Level 5 as is, and encouraging drivers to sit in the back with a blindfold on.
- BoorishBears 5y ago
  Actually the current state of the FSD Beta would be a great analogy, no alteration needed.
heavyset_go 5y ago
> At the end of the day no difference between Holmes being over-promising on blood testing, and Musk over-promising with your Tesla being a robotaxi that makes you $30,000 profit a year, by driving fully autonomously inside a vast network of underground 3D tunnels at speeds of 150 mph. There's a difference, Musk is wealthy and has mostly swindled consumers and retail investors, while Holmes wasn't wealthy and mainly swindled the wealthy.

jacquesm 5y ago

> Some engineers I spoke with told me she was 2 years before her big breakthru. That's pretty gullible given her history to date. 2 years before a breakthrough spells 'never', that's exactly how the rest of the investors got bilked.

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

Did these "some engineers" get their degree from a crackerjack box? Holmes was always full of shit, and a "big breakthru" in this area is impossible, as there is ample evidence that capillary blood at these volumes is simply not homogeneous enough to give accurate results for quantitative tests.

joering2 5y ago
Impossible with todays technology. When Musk was initially pitching electric car, everyone was laughing because back then the batteries density made it impossible for battery to be lightweight enough to be carried in a normal sized car. And look where we are today... Let's revisit Holmes claims in 15 years. Unless you want to argue that there will never be any progress made in terms of blood tests???
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  Not sure why I'm feeding the trolls, but anyway: > everyone was laughing because back then the batteries density made it impossible for battery to be lightweight enough to be carried in a normal sized car. That's simply untrue. The issue was always recognized to be economic, not a physical impossibility issue. There were a bunch of (crappy) electric cars in the 90s. With respect to Theranos, impossible as in it is physically impossible, because of the non-homogeneity of capillary blood. It simply doesn't matter how good your blood test is, if you are doing a quantitative test, for many types of tests you can simply not get good enough accuracy doing a finger prick test.
  - joering2 5y ago
  - fastball 5y ago
    When you said the 90s, did you mean the 1890s? If so, you would be correct.
  - CamperBob2 5y ago
    With respect to Theranos, impossible as in it is physically impossible, because of the non-homogeneity of capillary blood. It simply doesn't matter how good your blood test is, if you are doing a quantitative test, for many types of tests you can simply not get good enough accuracy doing a finger prick test. The crazy thing is, you don't have to consult biomedical engineers or pore over leading-edge research papers to discover this. You just need to ask almost any med tech with a modicum of experience with blood tests. They will tell you, in no uncertain terms, that Blood Does Not Work That Way. I will never understand the lack of due diligence performed by the Theranos investors. There couldn't possibly have been any due diligence at all. It's very hard to avoid slipping into victim-blaming mode in any conversation about this company.
- austinjp 5y ago
  You've leapt from 2 years to 15 years, I notice. And "blood tests" vs tests of capillary blood is a big difference.
  - joering2 5y ago
    Because of injustice that happened to Holmes (mostly because she is a woman; man promising all kind of crap never delivering have been given pass many times before - see Musk track record for reference), nobody is going to touch blood testing for a very long time. Hence 15 years.
    - MattGaiser 5y ago
      There is a difference between promising all sorts of stuff and making claims about what is already fact. Holmes ran afoul of the latter. Her claim was not that the machines will work. She could have freely made that claim. She fraudulently claimed that the machines did work.
    - copo233 5y ago
    - kuhewa 5y ago
      I can only guess you aren't actually familiar with Holmes' claims.
    - TylerE 5y ago
      She didn't suffer injustice for being a woman. She received justice for being a charlatan.
- copo233 5y ago
  You can't call dibs on any future progress in a field.
  - kordlessagain 5y ago
    That's a thing nowadays. Trevor Noah talked about this type of biased thinking recently. While it is true there may be a machine in the future that can do what Holmes claimed, there are still people who worked at the company who claimed it was impossible due to our current understanding of the laws of physics.
    - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
      > While it is true there may be a machine in the future that can do what Holmes claimed No, there won't. I feel the need to keep repeating this because for some reason many people seem to conflate "it is not possible with current technology" with "it is a physical impossibility". Doing accurate quantitative blood tests with a finger prick is a physical impossibility. All that said, one thing that made me especially mad about Theranos is that a lot of their ideas, e.g. one small, portable machine that can run tons of tests; simplified, consumer-accessible pricing; access at neighborhood pharmacies, etc., had a ton of value even if accomplished with venous blood draws. But instead Holmes' delusions of grandeur forced her to hang everything on the fraudulent, and impossible, "must be done with a finger prick" idea.
      - kordlessagain 5y ago
        I said may be. What is impossible is to negate a "maybe". While there may be physical limitation now, that doesn't mean there will be later. New understandings of physics may change that, as would new technology that wouldn't normally be researched along a given path to an idea or need (like a very small machine operating on very small samples). For example, we may find a way to use neutrinos to detect things we didn't know we could detect before, because someone theorized that doing XYZ with neutrenos allows us to detect them. That "discovery" (hypothetical) could then be repurposed to build a small machine that does what Holmes thought it could. Not that she thought about stuff like that - she was designing their stupid building instead. The point I was making was that not knowing now and then saying will will know later at which point "someone becomes right" is a biased way of thinking. My point was not to say there will or won't be, which is why I used "may be".
- withinboredom 5y ago
  And battery density still hasn’t changed much since then, despite him claiming we are always just a year away from doubling it. Sounds familiar…

kuhewa 5y ago

Were the engineers from the future?

axutio 5y ago

Holmes wasn't just making lofty promises about the future capabilities of her technology, she was lying about its current capabilities to investors and using unreliable diagnostic tools to provide patients with test results that were frequently wrong - real patients experienced real harm as a result. The better analogy would be Musk indiscriminately enabling full self-driving in every Model 3, claiming its Level 5 as is, and encouraging drivers to sit in the back with a blindfold on.

BoorishBears 5y ago
Actually the current state of the FSD Beta would be a great analogy, no alteration needed.

heavyset_go 5y ago

> At the end of the day no difference between Holmes being over-promising on blood testing, and Musk over-promising with your Tesla being a robotaxi that makes you $30,000 profit a year, by driving fully autonomously inside a vast network of underground 3D tunnels at speeds of 150 mph. There's a difference, Musk is wealthy and has mostly swindled consumers and retail investors, while Holmes wasn't wealthy and mainly swindled the wealthy.