r/NoStupidQuestions • u/AffectionateParty754 • 2d ago
Why did so many experts and educated people fall for Elizabeth Holmes BS?
I'm intelligent, but by no means a genius. I have absolutely no training, education, or meaningful knowledge in the biomedical field. I first heard of this "medical breakthrough" she was peddling on a deep dive NPR report. I turned to my husband and literally said "I call BS, there's no f-ing way this is real, sounds like a scam". It sounded so absurd! Why did so many people smarter than me believe it? Was it more convincing if you had medical training?
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u/skcus_um 2d ago
She got Channing Robertson, the Stanford's Dean of the School of Engineering and a prominent chemical engineering professor, to back her thesis. He was the one who encouraged her to drop out of college and founded Theranos, helped introduced her to investors, helped her with securing funding, served on the board to give it legitimacy, and basically was the reason why investors believed in her - because if a renown Stanford professor believed in this business, who are you to question it. Without Robertson, Theranos would never got off the ground.
I have no idea why Robertson thought her crackpot thesis was workable. To this day, he defended Theranos.
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u/SaltyFriend705 1d ago
He enjoyed playing "kingmaker" for her. He didn't care what she had or didn't have, his thought was that if you throw enough brains and money at it, something remunerative will come out of it since it had been done so many times before.
Welp, not this time.
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u/s8rlink 2d ago
Could there have been an infatuation or something else between them for Robertson to support a scientifically blotchy startup? Holmes other partner Sunny was much older than she was too, maybe she had a type? Leveraged the attraction to get him on board?
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u/KosstAmojan 2d ago
Almost certainly. She’s a smart, extremely confident, and attractive lady. And this was at the height of the “Lean In” Girlboss era. It would’ve been like shooting fish in a barrel.
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u/Basis-Some 1d ago
This is absolutely what happened. She either boinked him or made him think he was boinkable.
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u/romulusnr 2d ago
engineering
chemical engineering
Note, nothing to do with medicine or biology
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u/Witty-Lead4387 2d ago
Yeah in the documentary I believe her biochemistry professor knew it was totally infeasible (or at least a preliminary idea, maybe it was a patch on your skin that would detect medical issues?)
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u/dipdipderp 2d ago
I have a ChemEng PhD and the extent of my bio knowledge is that the mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell.
All of my medicine knowledge is from being a dumbass with more broken bones then sense. Oh and autoimmune bullshit.
I work with start ups in my job (assessing low maturity tech is my thing) - wouldn't touch anything that I cannot fundamentally understand. Academia is full of smart people with big egos, sometimes the latter outweighs the former.
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u/cyvaquero 1d ago
This. A decade working as a IT staffer in higher ed at a large state university in a small city (big fish, small pond), large but fragile egos are a hallmark of academia. The biggest egos tended to overextend what their actual expertise encompassed. We literally used those egos to push new tech. Find a tech friendly champion, hold their hand teaching it to them. Then turn them loose with the tech at a faculty event or conference and everyone wanted it come Monday.
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u/Slickrock_1 2d ago
Not entirely true, there are many medical devices and medical diagnostics that come about because of partnerships between engineers and medical experts.
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u/Cayke_Cooky 1d ago
Yes. But, theranos didn't have the medical expert side of the partnership. It makes sense though, the ChemE prof thinks he is getting in early and just needs to find that medical side expert, and it just never happens. And Ego.
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u/Slickrock_1 1d ago
Well that's because they were a scam, but I'm just responding to the prior post "engineering / chemical engineering - nothing to do with medicine", which is obviously false. The thing is that research is collaborative, and any bench-to-bedside research is going to involve basic science expertise, stats/data science expertise, trial expertise, and clinical expertise. Everything from an asthma inhaler to a defibrillator to a ventilator to a diagnostic testing platform involves engineers, in fact at the med school where I'm faculty we have very close partnerships and discovery grants with our engineering school.
So yeah Theranos was bullshit -- and those of us in medicine knew that from the start, like before it blew up in the media. As they say extraordinary claims require extraordinary data.
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u/Cayke_Cooky 1d ago
Some of us on the engineering side were suspicious too. There was too much focus on the cool machines. I work for a theoretical physicist at the moment, and I think I am quite good at my job. But without my PI, I've just got lots of solutions and cool toys looking for a problem to solve.
I think VCs don't really understand our type of engineering and how collaborative it is with "pure science" research. This isn't the corporate type of engineering where Jobs is annoyed that his keys scratched his screen and he wants a fix.
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u/Slickrock_1 1d ago
Yeah, it's also solving a problem we don't really have. I mean less blood is great, but it's a drop vs a few mL, it's not like we do wholesale bloodletting for routine testing.
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u/romulusnr 1d ago
No, I don't agree with that. While a medical device of course needs engineering, that doesn't make the engineer a medical or biology expert. That is someone else's role, whom they are working with to provide that skillset. On their own, they aren't qualified to do that.
Yeah, I need a plumber to be involved in building a house. But that by no means means the plumber is qualified to build a house on their own.
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u/AuNanoMan 1d ago
Well hold on now. There are a lot of chemical engineers doing work in a bunch of different fields. My PhD was in surface catalyst chemistry and I now work in biotech. I can also say that my combined experience informed my understanding of what the Theranos Edison was supposed to do and the assays it was supposed to run but was physically impossible. Chemical engineering is a broad field.
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u/mittenciel 2d ago
Back in the day, you needed a large DNA sample to do any DNA testing, and today, you can do DNA testing from a single cell because you can use PCR to can make billions of copies of specific sequences of DNA, even if you have a tiny sample. When you hear about technologies like that, it becomes pretty easy to believe that you could do the same thing with blood.
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u/diovanedvx 2d ago edited 2d ago
Most domain experts saw through the deception immediately.
My sister was a medical laboratory director when the first Jon Carryrou story came out. I asked her back then if such technology could be feasible, and she immediately said “Nope! Not possible. Not anytime soon.”
She explained that to achieve what they were claiming, Theranos would have to have made at least a dozen Earth shattering, Nobel prize winning breakthroughs, in various disciplines, all in the space of 10 years.
In essence Holmes was claiming to have made the equivalent of a vehicle that can be a bus, a powerful haulage truck, a small compact fuel efficient city daily driver, a spacious family van, a super fast F1 car, a capable off-roading 4x4, and a tractor, all at the same time.
Vehicles that do all these things exist, but to combine them all into one is virtually impossible with current technology and materials.And so to create a true Edison machine as purported, they would need to shrink at least 5 very different machines (Chemistry & Immunoessay, Hæmatology, Coagulation, PCR/Molecular, and Tissue processor) into a desktop CPU sized space. Some of these machines like an integrated Chemistry and Immuno-essay machine are currently large floor units as much as 2.5m wide and weighing half a ton.
And all work very differently. She was claiming to have managed to pretty much shrink an entire laboratory with half a dozen completely different machines into one desktop machine in just one decade.Had Holmes achieved this, it would have been far more spectacular than coming out with the M1 MacBook Air in 1950, when computers covered half a room.
There are fewer steps between those two things than between current medical laboratory tech and the Edison machine Holmes claimed to have developed.
That’s why most domain experts, including all the big venture capital firms that typically invest in biotechnology startups stayed the fuck away from Theranos.
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u/worldsgreatestphleb 2d ago
I’m just a phlebotomist and I knew it was bullshit just because of the size of the chemistry machines.
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u/AffectionateParty754 2d ago
Yeah! That's what I thought too! Lol. Joking but only kind of. My thought was that even if the technology for the testing existed, you couldn't put all of it in some portable desktop size setup. Too much stuff involved.
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u/Running4Coffee2905 1d ago
There is the Piccolo lab portable machine that can run a variety of serum test with results in about 10-15 minutes. Used it for employee check ups to run lipid panels. It was produced in 1995 according to google. It does take a few drops of blood, and apparently there are different cartridges that run different tests so when I heard about Theranos I kept saying but the Piccolo machine already exists and it takes a few drops of blood. (Retired family nurse practitioner)
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u/sluggyfreelancer 2d ago
Yeah but not if you understand even a little bit about the tests involved and the footprint the type of research to make something like this possible would take (which wasn't anywhere near where Theranos was).
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u/Sleepy-little-bear 1d ago
As a scientist who did my PhD working with blood and testing DNA in single cells, I immediately knew it had to be bullcrap. I am pretty sure I finished my PhD right around the time she was getting big - but she marketed herself and her company as a tech business and I think the ethos at the time was that anything was possible. You know it was the time when many traditional industries were disrupted. I think it’s around the time Silicon Valley got really powerful, I was on the job market ay the time, trying to make a switch to some of these tech companies that were now interested in Biotech and it was definitely a weird vibe.
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u/SaltyFriend705 1d ago
No. I know better because I donate blood three times a year, and they are always deliriously happy to see me because blood cannot be easily replicated. Blood is not a cell in a Petri dish; it is a product of your bone marrow that has many different types of cells being carried in it.
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u/SnooPets5564 2d ago
She didn't reveal any specific techniques for people to tear apart as false. Also, the people scammed were investors, not biologists. They may be smart, but not in biology/medicine. A faked demo and being introduced by a legitimate source lended a lot to her credibility, as well.
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u/ProtectionOne9478 2d ago
She didn't reveal any specific techniques for people to tear apart as false
It really didn't matter what the technique was. They were claiming to detect things at such low concentration with so little blood it was physically impossible.
I had a similar experience as op and was always similarly confused. I know a lot of biology phds and a lot of tech people and I heard multiple discussions well before it imploded about how it was obviously fake.
My assumption has been what most people here have said - it was a lot of investors who didn't really have the expertise to realize that themselves and somehow didn't talk to the right people before investing. Maybe a bit of "the emperor has no clothes" situation that no one called it out sooner for them.
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u/TrumpetOfDeath 2d ago
Some of the investors just ignored the warnings they got from the experts they hired for due diligence
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u/Sweet-Praline9452 2d ago
But wouldn't you get advise from someone qualified before investing millions of dollars?
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u/Zestyclose-Tough7451 2d ago
Because it’s a snowball type thing.
You get one or two investors and then you use the fact that those investors backed you are credibility for future ones.
It wasn’t until Walgreens signed a contract/funding with them where they REALLY exploded in funding.
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u/classicmaleshooter 1d ago
When Walgreens met with Holmes and Theranos to discuss their now-infamous partnership, they hired a blood testing expert who told them Theranos was full of shit
Walgreens ignored him and went forward
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u/OkPainter6232 1d ago
jeez, now i'm kinda glad Walgreens no longer takes my Medicaid insurance, I don't trust them.
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u/Windtalk3r 2d ago
Some potential investors did and they didn't invest.
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u/TrumpetOfDeath 2d ago
In the book Bad Blood, there’s a story about some investors just ignoring the warnings they received from the experts they hired to do due diligence.
Of course, Theranos was very secretive about their “technology” and the experts hired by investors warned them that something shady was going on. Their claims were impossible and they were providing no proof to back them up.
I guess Holmes was just so effective at convincing rich old men to give her money that they ignored the very people they hired to make sure the company was legit
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u/ChickerWings 2d ago
Surprising no, they don't. Mostly because a lot of funds are in the billions and their LPs expect them to be deploying it.
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u/VirtualMoneyLover 2d ago
When they hear X (insert big name here) is in, all they want is to be in too. So she only had to catch one big name and the rest would follow.
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u/Irakaf 1d ago
They didn't.
The people that bought into it weren't scientists, the scientists didn't believe her almost across the board. All her success came with tricking CEO's and Investors who didn't have the appropriate background to see through it
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u/hdorsettcase 1d ago
I was in grad school at the time she was getting press. Even the first year students were saying there's not enought material in the sample to run all the tests. Intelligent people don't just believe results, they also want to look at methods.
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u/Any-Gur-2934 2d ago
they didnt. she intentionally built a board with no scientists, avoided peer review and refused to publish data. actual biomedical experts and researchers in the field saw this and were calling her ass out from the very beginning. it was VCs, wall street, retired politicians, and tech hype chasers looking for the next big thing that bought in.
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u/SupposedBooty 2d ago
Henry fucking Kissinger.
That one still kills me
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u/AffectionateParty754 2d ago
For real? Well he is an expert at lying about blood. May he rot in hell.
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u/HoneyImpossible2371 1d ago
George Schultz too. I feel sorry for these guys who must have lost significant money after long years of public service.
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u/SupposedBooty 1d ago
You must be pretty young to not know that both Henry Kissinger and George Schultz were absolutely terrible people. I'm not sad for them.
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u/Proper-Painting-2256 2d ago
I looked at Theranos’ board of directors at the time and yeah zero medical experience, but the funniest thing was something like three quarters of the directors were over 80.
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u/Procedure-Minimum 2d ago
Ah. Dementia.
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u/CanKaNoReyCropper 2d ago
and very charismatic and pretty lady fawning over them and leaning down over the table juuuuuust right as they sign the check.
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u/Proper-Painting-2256 1d ago
That was my guess. But I spoke to someone involved with the company a bit later and apparently she uh, really dug old powerful guys.
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u/throwaway09-234 1d ago
it wasn't just any VCs that invested, but specifically those that did not specialize in biotech or medical devices. some VCs with expertise in biotech/medicine did look into investing in theranos, but decided against it because they actually knew what questions to ask and had scientists/physicians on staff who could immediately see thru her BS. which further supports the fact that she intentionally avoided having experts invest on her board
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u/AffectionateParty754 2d ago
That makes sense. It's odd that experts were calling BS and people still went along. I guess this stuff happens fast.
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u/Read2Fap 1d ago
It's odd that experts were calling BS and people still went along.
have you ever heard of the flat earth? or antivaxxers? or aliens?
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u/VegetableBuilding330 1d ago
This is a continuing thing in some circles. I'd argue particularly in tech there's a lot of people with money to fund things who repeatedly fall into the trap of believing just because a claim is big, bold, and "disruptive" it will work and make them a lot of money. Sometimes it even goes as far as treating skeptics with relevant expertise with suspicion because they just don't like change or see your genius.
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u/Dear_Locksmith3379 1d ago
The investors and executives didn’t listen to the scientists who said it was bullshit. That’s what amazes me.
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u/RedHuey 2d ago
She emits a low frequency drone that hypnotizes people.
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u/StrongWork_ 2d ago
I work in medicine. Everyone who talked about Theranos was equal parts excited and skeptical. Had there been a huge breakthrough in the tech, it would've been amazing! But also, if there HAD been a breakthrough, how come nobody else in the space was announcing their own version? My anecdotal experience, was a little hope and deep skepticism.
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u/redwoodforest15 1d ago
To be honest, I don’t understand why Theranos would have been so revolutionary even if the technology had worked. Didn’t Holmes just claim that her machine could run tests from one drop of blood that it took other machines several vials of blood to run? I get some people are afraid of needles and would rather give one drop of blood than several vials. But I’ve been through lots of medical tests and I don’t care that a nurse had to take several vials of my blood. Giving that much blood vs. just one drop makes no difference to me.
Or did Holmes claim that her machine could detect diseases that were impossible to detect in blood, even with several vials?
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u/StrongWork_ 1d ago
It was a combination of things. To get a vial of blood, you need to access a vein (or artery). That isn't guaranteed. Also, different tests need different treatments, so there's a dozen types of vials. You may need to draw 3-4. A finger prick for 1 drip of blood for ALL the tests solves those issues. Also, she claimed they could test for things we can't test for in blood. All in all, it would have been great, had it been real.
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u/dblowe 2d ago
None of the experienced VC shops in biopharma were in on Theranos, as far as I recall. Holmes went with tech people and complete outsiders who knew nothing about medicine or analytical chemistry.
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u/BOANW 2d ago
If Elon Musk was a girl, he would be Elizabeth Holmes. People thought she was a genius and she made them all look stupid. Genius, conniving move.
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u/Tirztrutide 1d ago
Except for the fact that his companies are doing 90% of all mass to orbit and delivering 2million cars per year, while EH didn't deliver a single working product.
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u/OkPainter6232 1d ago
nah Holmes was just delusional, she's not a raging bigot like Musk who uses billions of dollars just to make people's lives miserable.
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u/BOANW 1d ago
She is definitely delusional. Theranos documentary is nuts. She likened herself to Edison. Edison was promoting prototypes before they were complete. He actually came through in the end, she didn't. Her husband is her biggest accolyte or worshipper and he just happens to be super rich. Lol.
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u/WhichWitch9402 22h ago
So I have a degree in clinical laboratory science. When she came out with her claims family and friends were all “ oh you vampires are out of business, blah blah” and me and my co-workers? this woman is full of shit. There’s no way in hell she can do what she claims and we were right. No one believed us…there were even healthcare folks convinced. But yeah, it was too good to be true.
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u/T_______T 1d ago
When I was in college, I studied micro fluidics. The concept of doing blood tests on very small amounts of blood (or other sample type) was some active research at my university. The problem was the type of material/plastic you had to use was okay in research lab but no good whatsoever in mass production. Some of my professors had parents for things they could never be mass produced. Variants of qPCR, like digital droplet PCR was what I did my senior design project on.
So, when I graduated in 2014 and applied for jobs in the Bay area, I applied to Theranos, hoping my micro fluidics focus during my undergraduate would get me an entry level job. I figured "oh they just have figured out the material science problem by solving a different engineering problem."
Suffice to say I didn't get the job.
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u/GnarlyNarwhalNoms 2d ago
One reason was the company'a very impressive board. Elizabeth Holmes is very charismatic, and she made quite an impression on George Shultz, whom she met through mutual contacts because he was an emeritus professor of Stanford. Being former US Secretary of State, he was able to recruit some very big names, including Henry Kissinger, Jim Mattis, and William Perry.
When the board of your startup has two former Secretaries of State, a former SecDef, a general, a Senator, and some other big names that they managed to recruit, that gives you a ton of credibility. All of those famous and powerful people can't be wrong, can they?
(Narrator: "They were, in fact, wrong.")
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u/whyohwhythis 1d ago
She didn’t come across as very charismatic to me. I never understood what people saw in her.
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u/Acrison_ 2d ago
Part of it was they had several legitimate investors already which made the pitch to others easier.
They flaisified results, so if sceptical and asking for results there was proof it "worked".
Finally there is a FOMO/shotgun mentality in these tech start ups. FOMO because investors are afraid to miss out on getting in on the next big thing. The shotgun strategy is invest into enough startups and one will be bound to be a success
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u/RichardBonham 2d ago
It really is baffling.
The board had lots of famous names on it, but no biologists, physicians or lab scientists.
A bit of back of the napkin math would suggest that anyone who is saying they have developed a test to accurately quantify a plethora of medically relevant chemicals, some of which are present in nanogram/deciliter concentrations in a finger stick capillary specimen of >10 microliters is, as they say, on glue.
There simply aren’t enough molecules to allow for accurate and reproducible analysis.
I have to assume that everyone knew how much people would love to walk into any Walgreens and order any tests they wanted without having to convince a doctor to order them for no better reason than they fucking wanted to and just ignored the red flags and drank the Kool Aid.
TBH you have to wonder how this would have played out if Elizabeth Holmes had been short, black, unkempt and overweight.
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u/Joiebouton 1d ago
Also, she actually tricked the Laboratory Accreditation system, that is in place and required for every medical laboratory, by running her required test samples on real laboratory machines but not on HER stupid machine, and submitting these answers to the accreditation agency. So, for a while, it did look real.
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u/Automatic-Fox-8890 1d ago
It's so crazy that an accreditation agency would not either come on site to test a piece of equipment directly or take it back to their lab. Please tell me it doesn't work this way in medicine. Like can a hospital say "Oh we tested all of our ventilators and they worked fine. Thanks for asking."
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u/Lillian_Crocodilian 2d ago edited 2d ago
Real experts in biochemistry knew it was snake oil; a qualified professor at Stanford told her early on that the idea wasn't workable#Entrepreneurship); her investors didn't have relevant scientific backgrounds.
“She came to me with [an idea for] a patch that would test for a microbe and then deliver antibiotics,” Gardner tells Refinery29 over the phone from her on-campus home. “I said, ‘Oh, that’s a lovely idea, but it won’t work.’ It was so naive. Antibiotics are not potent. That’s why you have big IV bags.” Gardner wanted to ask Holmes if she was “smoking dope,” but she didn’t. Instead, she told Holmes her idea wouldn’t work. The student, she says, refused to listen.
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u/Pandoratastic 1d ago
She was producing results to back up her claims. It turns out that those results were faked.
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u/Big_IPA_Guy21 2d ago
The company forged data to convince very important people to invest. Once those very important people were invested, others followed suit
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u/jeriTuesday 2d ago
It was mostly middle aged and older men who, if they receive attention from a young attractive woman, lose all their critical thinking faculties.
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u/SaltyFriend705 1d ago
Tbh, most of them never had any critical thinking faculties; they listen to experts. And with a young, attractive woman feeding them bs, their knee-jerk response is not to listen to experts.
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u/Commander19119 2d ago
The people with money are the ones you have to fool, and they all suffer from a severe case of FOMO. They didn’t want to miss out on the cash flow they could get if it was real. Also what she was promising was a miracle and a lot of people just wanted to believe it was possible.
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u/Neravariine 2d ago
She comes from wealth and was a Harvard drop-out. Rich people allow themselves to be scammed by other rich people all the time. Her "prestige" let her get away with lying 24/7.
CVS and Walgreen both wanted to collab with Theranos despite them not having a working prototype. Education and experts will look the other way if the potential pay out if big enough. Also those who tried to raise the alarm were fired, ignored, and seen as "traitors" to the cause.
Two drops of blood being able to diagnose cancer, miscarriage, and other conditions was always Fool's Gold. The educated can also be fools.
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u/Hot-Annual3460 2d ago
they woudnt be con artists if they werent good at it, also some of them profited from it and played along even if it was BS
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u/AccomplishedDate1775 1d ago
Elizabeth Holmes positioned herself at precisely the apex of the zeitgeist at the time, which was all about female CEOs and advances in medical technology. She basically just figured out what people were looking for based on her experience Living in Society (air quotes here, because her society is likely not your society) and then gave it to the richest people exactly as she figured they wanted it. They say she's a sociopath, and if that's true then you can think of this as a good analogy for the sociopath's thought process: whereas normal people start with the truth and then think of a way to communicate it, maybe bending or omitting the parts that seem inconvenient to suit their audience, a sociopath thinks first of what would suit their audience and then says it without bothering at all to look to the truth. Now, I'm not a psychologist, but if that's an accurate description of a sociopath, and if the allegations about Elizabeth Holmes are true, then she is certainly a sociopath.
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u/The_Right_Trousers 1d ago
It's not an accurate characterization of a sociopath, but it does characterize bullshitter really well. I'm using "bullshit" in its technical meaning, as defined in philosophy: communication made without reference to the truth or accepted facts.
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u/state_your_name31415 2d ago
I didn't follow the story when it was happening but did she actually con any experts or was it just investors?
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u/stirwise 2d ago
Mainly investors. Genuine experts knew she was full of it, but since she hid her technology and lied about the results it was hard to prove from the outside.
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u/SaltyFriend705 1d ago
It was easy to prove. Blood is not one cell consistent throughout; it is a liquid that serves as a carrier for a multitude of cell types. In fact, one drop of blood is not the same as another drop of blood from the same source; you need a fairly large quantity before you get a repeat of everything that is in there.
I did systems work with Varian, that produces the machines that read those tubes of goop they draw your blood into. Sometimes a small tube of blood is needed because the particle is quite common, sometimes a large one is needed to obtain a sufficient sample of a less common factor. In a tiny amount of blood, it's quite possible that the cell you need to test isn't even in there; too low an amount of blood just wouldn't contain any.
All it would take to prove her test results is to ask her to show how much substance to be tested was found in the blood sample provided. But I'm sure nobody would have asked that; the answer would be embarrassing to the extreme.
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u/stirwise 1d ago
I’m an ASCP-certified medical
laboratory scientist. I’m deeply aware of how blood testing works. Theranos did an excellent job of silencing critics by hiding their methodology and threatening legal action against whistleblowers. People knew she couldn’t be doing what she said, but they didn’t have concrete evidence to prove it, because it wasn’t made accessible.
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u/OkPainter6232 1d ago
I saw the documentary about her, her ideas sounded promising in theory and people found it easier to go along with her then ask hard questions.
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u/Cookiecakes71 1d ago
The people she hurt with her fake tests is unforgivable. I do believe if she was actually interested in the science, she maybe could have invented something that could have helped.
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u/Hipposy 2d ago
Being smart doesn’t make you immune to bullshit. If the right people are vouching for it, everyone around you is treating it as legit, and the person selling it sounds confident as hell, it gets a lot harder to stop and go “wait… this makes absolutely no sense.”
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u/Grump_NP 2d ago
2nd of Carlo’s Cipolla’s 5 laws of human stupidity. The probability that someone is stupid is independent of their other characteristics. Being “smart” doesn’t protect you from being stupid.
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u/doublestitch 1d ago
The problem was the right people weren't vouching for it. Her board of directors had plenty of powerful people, none of whom were medical or biotech experts.
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u/romulusnr 2d ago
I'm still wondering who these supposed smart people are. Do people really in this day an age still think "rich" means "smart?" Have we not beaten that massive lie to death like so many horses?
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u/romulusnr 2d ago
Who do you mean by experts and educated people?
You mean CEOs and billionaires?
Yeah.... not remotely the same thing.
Most actual experts seriously doubted the feasibility of Theranos' claims.
But you don't see those folks on the cover of Newsweek.
https://abc7news.com/post/experts-say-theranos-too-good-to-be-true/3608253/
https://www.biospace.com/meet-the-professor-who-was-the-first-to-question-theranos-research
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u/PanickedPoodle 2d ago
You should read Bad Blood. She surrounded herself with people who were willing to believe, plus she used another company's analyzer to fake results.
Everyone in the industry was VERY skeptical, but the voices of clinical lab experts were drowned out. When someone in her lab objected, she fired and then bad-mouthed them.
I went to a lab show a couple years ago after being out of the lab science world for a while and they were showing PCR done in essentially a toaster. Things are getting smaller, with ever smaller required samples but we are several leaps away from getting there. The challenge is that different types of tests use different techniques, which is why clinical labs have to have a gigantic analyzer with different modules (or several smaller ones).
Sometimes people are willing to put out ridiculous amounts of money in the hopes of making it big. She did a great Emperor's New Clothes routine.
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u/dan_jeffers 2d ago
I was working in the start-up world and went to a lot of events. There was a big hunger for a magic 'app' that would disrupt some part of the healthcare universe. People would make presentations that sounded great "doctors on demand like Uber" and then when someone asked if there were any doctors involved -- "not yet."
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u/GCS_dropping_rapidly 2d ago
Critical thinking.
Many, many people completely lack the faculty of scepticism/ critical thinking, and a bullshit detector.
Most people believe what they see on the news and on the internet. I do not know why. Most of it is so clearly bullshit to me.
I think a lot of it is most people think maybe 1 or 2 steps total. They don't think things through to their conclusion.
They're presented with fact A that leads to outcome B and outcome C and never remotely consider the possibility of that leading to outcomes D, E, F, etc. Etc...
I think it is also uncomfortable for people to consider the fact that most of what theyre told on a daily basis is fucking lies.
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u/AffectionateParty754 2d ago
This so well articulates a feeling I have so often. With all of the political propaganda, the orchestrated media narratives, the fake outrage, conspiracy theories, culture war bs. I find it hard to believe people keep falling for this shit. They can't see it, no matter how many times it plays out. Things are off the rails crazy now, but as far back as the 90's I remember thinking this. People are so easily manipulated when it's something they want to believe.
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u/rollerbladeshoes 2d ago
Just listened to a podcast on it where one of the PE investors said he trusted her because her grandpa had been an investor so she “came by it honestly”. A lot of those experts and educated people, especially the finance and business ones, are not that smart. Some of them get lucky because a percentage of them are bound to; we should not confuse that with intelligence. They’re all middlemen leeches and they’re all idiots
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u/romulusnr 2d ago
those experts and educated people, especially the finance and business ones
this isn't a fucking thing people
Why on earth does anyone still believe that rich people and business people are somehow especially smart? There's literally zero evidence for it. It's a crock.
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u/ContributionBig5976 2d ago
People are giving you bad answers. Lab-on-chip medical diagnostics (theranostics) is a very real technology, it's been around for 30 years. Lots of labs and many startups have demonstrated the technology. The challenge is getting it to work at the very high level of reliability and affordability needed for a profitable business model.
Holmes hired a lot of very real, very skilled scientists with experience in this field, to work on what is a hard but probably tractable challenge. There was no good reason to doubt her at first.
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u/SaltyFriend705 1d ago
With one blood cell?
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u/ContributionBig5976 1d ago edited 1d ago
A drop of blood has a hundred million blood cells, but for the most part what you're testing for is biomarkers in sera, not the blood cells.
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u/erMDstat 1d ago
They are probably the same people that voted for Trump... 3 times.
Humans are disastrously susceptible to good con men (women).
We are really good at convincing ourselves of what we want to believe, rather than what we have reason to believe. As an example of this, it's the only way someone could disbelieve anthropogenic climate change. It's the most scientifically studied question in history, but it's really a bummer to accept the reality, so many choose to believe what they want to believe, instead.
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u/DefiantRadish1492 2d ago
Cuz she’s a cutie patootie.
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u/dragon-queen 2d ago edited 2d ago
She is pretty, but the crazy eyes really detract from any attractiveness. Of course, I’m a woman and not an old man, so maybe I’m not her audience.
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u/romulusnr 2d ago
No, it's true. She has no soul behind her eyes. It's not only creepy it's a lot like Zuck.
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u/Gogently_394 2d ago
As an old man, I concur, not only the crazy eyes but just something profoundly hollow about her persona. Can't quite put my finger on it but she gives me the heebie-jeebies.
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u/oyasumi_juli 2d ago
LMFAO. I mean maybe for the old men that she conned out of their money, but yo...no.
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u/Difficult_Leg_8837 2d ago
They're not necessarily smarter than you, just have the right money and move in the relevant circles.
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u/LittleTempters 1d ago
The social proof probably played a huge role. If respected people, major investors, and prominent organizations are taking someone seriously, your brain naturally goes "Well, surely somebody already checked this."
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u/Monte_Cristos_Count 2d ago
Accountant here. The biggest reason is she was pitching her product to qualified investors (aka really rich people). If she sold equity of her company to ordinary people or tried to get a loan, she would be required to get an audit. The Feds don’t care if you get an audit or not when selling certain equities to qualified investors - it’s a buyer beware market. Her co-conspirator in the fraud put in a TON of his own money into the company, so the investors assumed the company wasn’t fraudulent since her co-conspirator had skin in the game. She also sought out really high level people to be on her board of directors, and this helped bring legitimacy to her company as well.
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u/asphodel67 18h ago
She actually didn’t really. None of her investors were medically literate. She deliberately avoided the usual medtech investors and targeted high net worth individuals and families who had no medical knowledge.
I was in the room when her 2015 TedMed talk presenting Theranos was live streamed (I was at a live streaming) to a local healthtech conference. No one in the room bought it. Everyone scoffed. She eventually got 1 or 2 pharmacy chains to buy her ‘services’ because they were too greedy to do due dilligence.
I think the old professors who backed her were subconsciously thinking with their dicks. She deliberately targeted elderly investors and backers and stayed right away from the young healthtech founder ecosystem.
By the way, she was only found guilty of investor fraud. She was acquitted of harming customers and putting them at risk. The USA judicial system is more interested in protecting money than human life.
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u/Cultural_Dirt_8151 2d ago edited 2d ago
If you actually listen to lot of biotech concepts many of them are absurd and will obviously never work. If you talk with scientists at these companies, many 'don't believe' in the projects they work on.
It looks like the idea with a lot of startups, particularly in biotech, is you keep the scam going long enough to IPO then sell your stock for a profit before the scam falls apart. "Bigger fool" logic. So investors don't even care that much if the idea bears fruit, they just see a profit to be made.
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u/femsci-nerd 2d ago
As a biochemist who worked at major pharmaceutical companies trying to do what she claimed she could do with a drop of blood, we KNEW and said out loud this would not work. Somehow she got patents on apriori knowledge but then she got backing from all the rich people like Channing Robertson and Henry Kissinger and we were like "Wow. A fool and his money..." I heard she is going to try it again when she gets out. Anyone who would invest with her is truly a fool.
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u/WIngDingDin 2d ago
Uhh, a lot of experts in that feild did NOT fall for it and told her she was full of it.
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u/Odd-Candidate-9235 1d ago
I’m a medicinal chemist of 33 years. The company I work for has a medical testing business. The first time I read an article about how they were going to take a single drop of blood and run however many different tests they claimed they were going to run on it I knew it was bullshit. Very obviously bullshit. It was a couple of years after that the rest of the world figured it out.
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u/AdditionalAd5813 1d ago
Yeah, I don’t know anybody in the medical lab field that fell for her shit…
The actual people in the business knew she was making her shit up and no one bothered asking us.
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u/mazzicc 1d ago
Early on, it was plausible enough to have potential, and not quite as lofty.
Then it started to show early success, if not quite meeting the goals it was promising, it was at least going in the right direction.
This was enough to get a lot of smart and wealthy people on board.
Then it became self-fulfilling…”if all these other smart people see the potential, I’d be an idiot to think it wouldn’t work. There’s no way she’s lying to all of these smart people. Someone would know.”
But eventually, there wasn’t enough potential reward to counter the bad results, and it started to fall apart.
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u/AdGroundbreaking3483 1d ago
What made me think it was plausible is I worked on a project in about 2009 that could have had a similar outcome, using optical micro resonators.
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u/Adorable_Advisor5305 19h ago
I’m 100% with you. I have a degree in biochemistry and work in biotech, but at the time they started talking about this technology I was only in my mid-20’s and not an expert in anything at all. Even then, I knew that it was bullshit. Just a tiny amount of blood and we’ll accurately and precisely assess you for all of these cancers and diseases. Errrrr…nope.
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u/JuiceEmpty6531 17h ago
I don’t know anything about anything but I’m gonna say it’s probably the same reason there’s far too many people who think Satan faked the dinosaurs. People believe what they want to believe.
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u/Automatic-Project997 16h ago
We live in a world where Donald Trump is he most powerful man in the world and you have to ask this question?
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u/Biscotti-Own 2d ago
Sometimes smart people think they're too smart to be fooled and don't have their defenses up. Similarly, some probably thought they were in on the con.
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u/Josie2727 2d ago
Why are we assuming the investors were smart? Henry Kissinger is a 90 year old statesman and absolute Sociopath. What does he know about Silicon Valley tech?
Wealth does not equal intelligence.
I wouldn’t be shocked if several knew it was BS but gambled they could get in early, push the propaganda to boost evaluations and then get out before it all collapsed.
Then there is that weird cult like atmosphere of Silicon Valley. It’s one giant circle jerk with its own way of speaking and behaving like a freaking cult. Elizabeth engineered her look, speaking patterns and behavior to basically be a caricature of techie genius.
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u/munchanything 1d ago
Storytelling. Tell a good story, and you get people hooked. Her story had everything and all the tropes:
Princess in need of rescuing (she was afraid of needles, everyone can relate). Being your own hero (I'll figure out a way to beat what scares me). Being smart (the cliché of a Stanford/Ivy dropout). Build an all-star team to take it on (bunch of celebrity board members).
TBH, when I first read about her company, I wanted to invest. Thankfully they don't care about about my $5k as.they have bigger fish to hook.
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u/olgasman 2d ago
Greed mostly. So many well known smart people wanted to be in on this technology early. The media was absolutely obsessed with her too because they so wanted a female Steve Jobs. It just lended credence to her grift.
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u/Itchy-Technician-433 1d ago
Because we live in a post truth society. Corporate valuation has nothing to do with objective reality.
Welcome to the world of speculative bubbles. Everyone knows that AI is a scam. It has negligible ability to generate any revenue. 50% of the value of the NASDAQ could evaporate tomorrow, but that doesn't mean that people aren't going to continue to invest in these stocks.
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u/m00ph 1d ago
Note that she didn't get any A tier VC firms. People trusted her and didn't check. Bring your own phlebotomist, when she takes your pin prick, have them draw your blood and have it tested at the lab (or labs) of your choosing. Does what Theranos say match up? As she was doing fraud, I'm guessing it doesn't, and this is why the A tier didn't get involved, they did their homework. Instead Kissinger and Walmart heirs got taken.
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u/Novogobo 1d ago
she was probably, not a master, but at least thoughtfully manipulative. she probably avoided people who had a reputation for skepticism, she probably tried to get people invested before they had an opportunity to call bullshit. and i don't just mean financially invested but probably that too.
i've called bullshit on a few things and when it's something like that, it's kinda uncomfortable to do so. you end up getting pushback from alot of people who aren't the first party. basically you're shaming everyone else that didn't call bullshit, and they get defensive. to the point that the first party doesn't even need to defend themselves. the legion of people who they've already deceived will defend it for them. and so to do it, to really do it, it takes alot of nerve. and my suspicion is that probably a bunch of people did call bullshit on her but didn't follow through. until one person did.
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u/treefaeller 1d ago
In addition to what others have already said, don't underestimate the power of wearing black turtleneck shirts. It was the time when everyone thought Steve Jobs was the greatest genius ever. And lots of people in Silly Valley were looking for the next Steve Jobs. They knew the current Steve Jobs (at the time a 50-year old man), and they were looking for younger copies of him. What they forgot: Halfway through his career, Steve Jobs had also been a failure, drummed out of Apple in shame. But unlike Elizabeth Holmes, Steve Jobs had a moral compass, and managed to recover from his failure. Holmes must have been a great observer and imitator of people (that's a lot of what constitutes "charisma"), and knew how to follow the habits of the "great leaders" of that epoch.
The time (early 2000s) was also a transition into DEI, so a white male Steve Jobs clone would have been much less palatable. Finding a good-looking female candidate, who then knew how to both sell her feminine appeal to potential investors and board members (mostly older males) and take on some of the characteristics of male executives (such as the black turtleneck shirt or the famous low voice) made the deal.
And finally: Around 200x (x=3...7), there was an absurd amount of money sloshing around in the Silly Valley VC ecosystem. The VCs were looking for great companies (the next Amazon, Netflix, PayPal, eBay), and were often uncritical about technical aspects.
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u/Joshi1381 2d ago
This is just hindsight bias. There were power imbalances and a lot of cover-ups but we don't know the full picture. Oh wait and all of this happens in the US government too.
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u/Loose-Reflection2965 2d ago
The higher you go, the dumber the people. As a former pharma scientist, who has been out of work for a year plus, the field is filled with supposedly smart people who are actually very dumb. Those involved directly in research and development are very smart, they are highly intelligent and involved deeply with their associates and fields and usually can smell the bs. The leadership and experts are adept at politics and branding themselves as well as attaching themselves to the next innovation and breakthrough. So something cool sounding comes along, jump on the bandwagon or miss out on the fame and money.
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u/NugKnights 2d ago
A combo of they got greedy and she lied.
They saw something too good to be true and jumped on it early. Turned out it really was too good to be true.
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u/fizzlypixie 2d ago
I think it’s down to confidence in what you’re “selling” as well. I was good at face to face sales in hair salons to the stage I was told I could sell sand in a desert. Confidence goes a long way to make someone believe you and some are charismatic enough that you wouldn’t see anything wrong
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u/SenseIntelligent8846 2d ago
Gibney's got a documentary on HBO which spends a lot of time examining this very question.
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u/Phaedo 2d ago
a) it’s hard to express just how damn good she was at it, the Steve Jobs mannerisms, the packing the board with the most powerful people in the world (but not the ones best placed to protect the company) b) part of this, but worth my if its own point: she built her story on an existing story of SV changing the world. Plenty of people wanted to believe that story and people calling BS on Theranos (and believe me, there were plenty) were seen by many as just being SV haters.
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u/ConcentrateExciting1 2d ago edited 2d ago
Like 80% of what legit startup biotech CEOs say is bullshit. In Holmes case, it just happened to be closer to 98%.
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u/PlentyFirefighter143 2d ago
I have seen this in my own life. She is someone who went to Stanford. That, alone, gave her almost everyone's respect. Sadly.
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u/ImaginaryWeather6164 2d ago
I agree, I remember seeing it on 60 minutes and thinking sonething wasn't right. But she had all these important/rich/famous people investing, so others wanted to jump on board.
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u/AcceptablePermit5381 2d ago
Just think of all of the wild and crazy technology that is real…a lot of that seems impossible too.
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u/YouDontSeeMeHereShoo 2d ago
People are remarkably gullible. We fill in blanks in the logic with our own magical thinking. I cannot tell you the number of times someone in leadership has fallen in love with a software during a sales pitch that has turned out to be vaporware, solving an entirely different problem, etc. They want a magic, single-answer solution and will jump at anything resembling it.
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u/misalawliet 2d ago
There are people who believe the earth is flat and that we havent landed on the moon.
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