<story><title>U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-files-criminal-charges-against-theranoss-elizabeth-holmes-ramesh-balwani-1529096005</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>maxxxxx</author><text>Does anybody know if Theranos got started with at least an idea how to accomplish what they wanted to do? From what I have heard in interviews they started with the thought &amp;quot;Doing xxx would be super useful&amp;quot; but didn&amp;#x27;t have an approach for accomplishing this but instead took in money and tried to figure it out. It&amp;#x27;s like me saying &amp;quot;An antimatter drive would revolutionize space exploration&amp;quot; and starting to collect money but without even the faintest idea how to produce one.&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know? Did Holmes have any insight that caused her and the investors to believe she could do the blood tests?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>atombender</author><text>This interview with John Carreyrou [1], the Wall Street Journal journalist who is largely responsible for exposing Theranos, goes into a lot of detail. It&amp;#x27;s long, so if you want a shorter answer, jump to the question &amp;quot;What technology did Theranos actually develop?&amp;quot;:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Basically there were three iterations of the technology. The first one used microfluidics, which are basically the repurposing of the micro-fabrication techniques that the computer chip industry pioneered to move tiny volumes of liquid. Theranos tried to work on that for several years before Holmes lost patience in late fall 2007 and abandoned it. At that point she pivoted to what was essentially a converted glue-dispensing robot. One of the engineers ordered a glue-dispensing robot from a company called Fisnar in New Jersey, studied its components and rebuilt a smaller version of it. It was a robotic arm on a gantry with three degrees of motion and a pipette stuck to its end, and it replicated what the scientist does at the bench. That ended up being called the Edison and it could do only one class of test, known as immunoassays. It was also error-prone. The third iteration of the technology was the miniLab, which Holmes wanted to be able to do more than just immunoassays. The miniLab didn’t invent any new techniques to test blood with. It miniaturized existing laboratory instruments and packed them into one box. By the time Theranos went live with its tests, the miniLab was a malfunctioning prototype.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;The interview also explains how Holmes was able to attract so many influential people on her board. The short answer is her Jobs-like &amp;quot;reality distortion field&amp;quot; -- she was exceedingly good at convincing non-scientists that their science worked.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;m.nautil.us&amp;#x2F;issue&amp;#x2F;60&amp;#x2F;searches&amp;#x2F;does-theranos-mark-the-peak-of-the-silicon-valley-bubble&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;m.nautil.us&amp;#x2F;issue&amp;#x2F;60&amp;#x2F;searches&amp;#x2F;does-theranos-mark-the-...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-files-criminal-charges-against-theranoss-elizabeth-holmes-ramesh-balwani-1529096005</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>maxxxxx</author><text>Does anybody know if Theranos got started with at least an idea how to accomplish what they wanted to do? From what I have heard in interviews they started with the thought &amp;quot;Doing xxx would be super useful&amp;quot; but didn&amp;#x27;t have an approach for accomplishing this but instead took in money and tried to figure it out. It&amp;#x27;s like me saying &amp;quot;An antimatter drive would revolutionize space exploration&amp;quot; and starting to collect money but without even the faintest idea how to produce one.&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know? Did Holmes have any insight that caused her and the investors to believe she could do the blood tests?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gamblor956</author><text>They had a good idea of what they &lt;i&gt;wanted&lt;/i&gt; to do (blood tests using very thin needles) but never successfully figured out how to accomplish that with the level of accuracy required.&lt;p&gt;Most Medical professionals believe that what they wanted to do was simply impossible from a biological perspective due to the natural variations of blood content. It would have been like trying to determine traffic on a freeway by taking a brief glance through a tiny slit in a piece of paper.(This is why they draw so much blood for testing, to try and get a fairly representative sample.)</text></comment>