It's too bad for them they had already crashed before covid. We're living through a golden age of medical fraud.
My brother who's in biotech suggested at the time (when it was collapsing but before the full extent of the fraud was apparent) that it's understated how much many bio ventures are moonshots - hopefully there's one or more breakthroughs they revolve around, but they can boil down to seeing if the goal can be met by throwing enough money at it.
But there were I think other valid questions at the time whether this goal was even scientifically possible even with magic tech, given how few of the molecules-needing-detection would exist in the proposed sample volumes.
This is being taken seriously and expeditiously dealt with because, like Madoff, she defrauded plutocrats. If she had merely defrauded and perhaps killed commoners, it would drag on forever and perhaps just fizzle.
A bog part of the problem is that a lot of swinish plutocrats have so much money in their slush funds that they can dish out $10,000,000 without bothering to check what it is they're investing in. They just don't have the time, not for a measly ten million. But their people are able to make sure justice is done after the fact, because they can't just let this kind of thing keep happening.
Holmes was great at projection of image, and even the plutocr atic swine live in the world of image.
3: That's why the boner pill people can keep in business.
Bad Blood is such a great book. Certainly one of my favorite parts of the whole story is that the very first thing that happens is that she goes to talk to Prof. Phyllis Gardner about it, who just immediately sees it's impossible and shoots it down. And then a bunch of dumb men hungry for attention from a young woman go and fall for the scam.
I think it was pretty brave if Tyler Shultz to be a whistleblower when his grandfather was on the board and was not inclined to believe him.
I'm of the opinion that we are paying the price for tolerating so much fraud for so long that we've trained an army of predators how to prey on society resulting in one of them taking over a political party.
Evidence for 3 could be that she was acquitted of the charges having to do with patients, and convicted of those relating to funders.
8: This is true in foreign policy as well. In Afghanistan, our military-industrial complex put together a government so corrupt that the locals ended up preferring the Taliban.
My impression is that the judge blocked the patients from testifying about most things, and that's why the patient counts didn't stick.
cosign 3.
Screens from a small volume of blood are a long-standing goal, there are many rounds of initial success (faked by Theranos' management, so with Holmes personally responsible) followed by inability to reproduce. There was a huge interest in a somewhat challenging technique that looked to provide a blood test for some cancers, years later it turns out the excitement was choice of tubing in the original experiment, that result buried fine print. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15563493/
Again, Holmes was an unambiguous fraudster-- optimism is hard to distinguish from fraud, but even in the most favorable light, Theranos was fraud from after the prototype machine, and probably even before that.
Certainly one of my favorite parts of the whole story is that the very first thing that happens is that she goes to talk to Prof. Phyllis Gardner about it, who just immediately sees it's impossible and shoots it down.
I think one of my favorite parts is when they're actually collecting orders, and then shipping it out to a real lab for diagnostics, at a loss. It's so eggs from Malta at 7¢ apiece.
It may explain a lot that the most prominent idiots that fell for this, were several of the people most responsible for US foreign policy over the last 50 years.
Because they can't finish Catch-22 either?
There's nothing to finish. It's a lot of disjointed paragraphs, so when you get to the last page, you just turn it upside down and keep reading.
(The opening scene, with the guy in the body cast with the two tubes from jars, one leading to mouth and one to crotch, and when one jar is full and one is empty, the nurses just switch the jars? that is supposed to be instructional on the eternity of the book.)
Thanks. I've always felt vaguely bad that I never finished it.
I read somewhere that it was rejected by numerous publishers, with one remarking that it was a one-joke novel. Which isn't wrong, but it's a good joke.
There's the title joke and the price of eggs joke.
I read it several times as a teenager. I loved it.
Kids love stories about egg arbitrage.
At about fourteen I was reading it as I walked down a flight of stairs at school and came to the bit where they unzip the flight suit of the wounded air gunner (Snowden) and his stomach falls out, and you see that he'd had tomatoes for breakfast.
There was a window halfway down these stairs, and I sat down on the window ledge as if my legs had been taken out from under me. I looked out at the garden below -- it was that sort of school -- and knew that all I ever really wanted from life was to make words do that to someone else.
For the record, I was rather pleased with "pour one out for my Holmies" in the OP.
"Thera-nose Dive" was admittedly pretty weak, though.
25: That was excellent.
26: I'm still not sure I get that one.
26. I admit that when I saw it I thought I'd missed a story about somebody crashing a plane into a volcanic island in the Aegean and fucking up a load of bronze age archaeology
Ha, I made the same association. But then I would.
I was on the island and they had a strike so I couldn't go see the museum.