Can somebody please objectively fill me in on what caused the failure of Theranos? Is it a scam from the get go? I had high hopes after reading the profile of their CEO.
Theranos announced that it had a technological breakthrough that took less time/money/blood for the same results.
Walgreens, seeing a potential competitive advantage, partnered with Theranos to start administering the tests with a promise from Theranos that everything was good & on the up-and-up.
When the FDA started looking at the quality of the tests Theranos was administering they felt that they were not good & not on the up-and-up. The tests failed the criteria that made them valid.
In the mean time Walgreens customers potentially received treatments for illnesses they didn't have (or worse, missed illnesses they did) because Theranos misrepresented, implicitly or explicitly, the quality of their tests.
The part that makes it hard to disentangle the internet hates from the actual problems with the company is it's founder: Elizabeth Holmes. Questions have been raised around whether Elizabeth Holmes did anything meaningful or if she simply curried some personal connections into a company that then became a shell game of smoke and mirrors. She spent a lot of time currying press attention, bilking herself as the next Steve Jobs while her company was being ran by ???
- No Research to prove this methodology worked - Influential parents with connections in D.C helped create a powerful board with members such as Henry Kissinger - Theranos knew their results were flawed but did not report - According to FDA, labs were deficient and their quality control methods themselves were deficient - They claimed to run 70 tests from a tiny sample of blood from your finger tip when they had permission to do only one test from FDA.
This stuff is crazy. Kudos to the folks who did the investigative journalism to uncover these things. It looks like people's lives were put at risk with this company.
It seems like if they were just not accurate enough, they could have tried to save face and call it a "screening", while acknowledging that it's not as conclusive as a test. If it's easy and convenient, you could weed out type 1 errors (false positives) in subsequent standard testing, while acknowledging that the test isn't 100% accurate (has type 2 errors).
Whatever mix of these they were originally planning, they put a lot of emphasis in the press on the new technology. When this didn't pan out like they had hoped, they were not able to focus more on business process improvements, and in fact continued to emphasize their new tech and downplay the issues it faced (not really sure what these were, but overall there seemed to be a lack of hard evidence for the accuracy of the tests).
The real story turns out that the whole thing was smoke and mirrors and it was obscured by both her secrecy, her powerful connection and the point that some are making here in part the image of a woman wasn't one that they wanted to look at critically.
It isn't the entire problem but, it contributed.
Also, I don't think that the opposite would be true, that if she were a man, she would have gotten more scrutiny. I think it wouldn't have been a factor to be pointed out. People are ready and willing to see men as villains. There are plenty of companies founded by people with a deep powerful roster and that have pulled the wool over many peoples' eyes founded by men.
This is just far worse because this is a medical device issue and obscuring and ignoring standards is playing with people's lives. Martin Shkreli was tarred and pilloried in the press for merely increasing the price of a drug treatment that we knew to work. Theranos misguided people into believing that their treatment worked when it didn't. All the money in the world can't buy back the time to detect issues and diseases that could be caught early or caught at all with other higher standard tests.
Her gender isn't everything but, it did contribute and even now we treat her with kid gloves in public opinion despite the depth of what Theranos did and worse how it conspired to do it.
edit - spelling
What this does show is that the genders are also equal in their capacity to engage in this kind of asshattery.
"I am a woman and my experiences have been that this is a serious handicap for getting effective constructive feedback. Men don't really want to have a serious conversation with me about what works, what doesn't, why that is true, etc. If they talk to me at all, many of them are either 1) trying to be charming, even if they have no explicit goal of trying to sleep with me or 2) trying to be encouraging, as if the deeply rooted problems of sexism boil down to "girls just lack confidence!"
What do you call this?