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Comment by AngeloAnolin | Hacker News Reader

I've read the book by Carreyrou - Bad Blood [1] and up until this time, I am left wondering if she really was insane, or on the firm belief that she can revolutionize something.

For her to be able to convince a lot of people - companies, investors, CEOs and perhaps a multitude of bright people to do what seems to conclude as a big fraud is still mind boggling to say the least.

You got the best engineers, doctors, laboratory technologists, medical techs, pharmacists, and just about everyone in science, and yet they continued for so long on this path of bizarre development of a product. Why did these people only realized when it was too late and that everything would crumble down at some point? They must have shared her vision with an intensity that has out shined their conscience and common sense.

[1] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Bad-Blood

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"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

-- attributed to various sources; see for example: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/

It seems her family connections had a major role in convincing people to go on board. In retrospect , her public appearances, including the turtlenecks, the deeper-voice-training, her public talks where she pitches the 10000 hours bs, should have rang a few bells about not only her intelligence, but about her sanity. Makes one also wonder what was the quality of the engineers she employed. The one who eventually spoke out was the nephew of one of the investors, i.e. someone who could afford to do so (and who presumably cared about his uncle).

I read the grandson was originally scolded and blackballed by his grandfather. Including surprise visits by Theranos lawyers at his grandfathers. Only after his claims were corroborated by others the family reversed course.

Power and connections, get the right people to buy in and you can do almost anything.

>In the past year and a half, the grandson and grandfather have rarely spoken or seen one another, communicating mainly through lawyers, says Tyler Shultz.

>Mr. Shultz says lawyers from the law firm founded by David Boies, one of the country’s best-known litigators and who later became a Theranos director, surprised him during a visit to his grandfather’s house.

They unsuccessfully pressured the younger Mr. Shultz to say he had talked to the reporter and to reveal who the Journal’s other sources might be. He says he also was followed by private investigators hired by Theranos.

[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/theranos-whistleblower-shook-th...

Also strongly recommend the Dropout [1], a podcast following Holmes and Theranos.

[1] http://abcradio.com/podcasts/the-dropout/

Is this podcast narrated by Rebecca Jarvis?

I’ve never understood what the real world-changing part of Theranos was. Ok great you can do lab tests with less blood, is it to save people squeamish about larger blood draws? Maybe I don’t understand it but this always seemed silly to me and more about convenience. The disruption was about replacing phlebotomists? We make plenty of blood.

I think the idea was that blood testing could be done on a significantly larger scale and that somehow would pay dividends health and otherwise wise. You'd be doing blood testing for almost anything then. You can insert what you feel that might be. You're not wrong as the questions start to mount there.

Still significantly more tests, with less blood, at way cheaper prices could earn them a ton of money, of course they couldn't actually do any of that.

Elizabeth’s impromptu pitch about how her novel way of testing blood from just a finger prick could help diagnose and treat wounded soldiers faster, and potentially save lives, had found a receptive audience in the four-star general. - Bad blood.

It can be a real PITA if you have to do regular bloods. At one point I had to take an extra day off a week before my regular clinic just to do bloods. It can also be a time consuming process to find a vein and draw blood.

If I could pop into my local GP (family doctor) or have a mobile service come to work and quickly do the tests id be saving a lot of annual leave

I believe Holmes' claimed their eventual goal was to eventually enable people to have their finger stick blood testing devices in their own homes.

more tests with fewer draws. getting people to have blood tests is a lot of work, if you reduce the number of times you have to do it, the number of tests people get goes up.

well if there was a device you could buy to do the tests at home i d buy it for sure

It's strictly FOMO. As they say with VC's: Nobody wants to invest in you until one VC wants to invest, then everybody wants to invest.

> For her to be able to convince a lot of people - companies, investors, CEOs and perhaps a multitude of bright people to do what seems to conclude as a big fraud is still mind boggling to say the least.

It's not that mind-boggling honestly. We're overloaded with information and have too little pertinent information (and information-gathering time) to make informed decisions. The most dangerous people in society right now are people who believe in their own bullshit. Their absolute sincerity is enough to dupe people and part them from either their money or their influence.

And amidst all that ... it appears they solved NONE of the problems associated with producing the product promised.

Everyone went along and yet there was nothing of value.

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