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Comment by pg_bot | Hacker News Reader

Listen to the full interview here: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/10/early-theranos-investor-tim-...

As the founder of a healthcare company, Tim's statement here is the one that I found the most dangerous

"If all she had to do was say this was a beta or whatever and all of us would be using it, would be loving it."

When it comes to people's health you must have concrete evidence that your product works and is robust. Blood testing is not a field where people accept mistakes. Anyone working in this field is used to scrutiny, it is your burden to prove that what you are working on is safe and useful.

There are a lot of quacks, hucksters, and fakes out there proceed with caution.

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Ridiculous - you're not allowed to release a "beta" in medicine. (I don't use "healthcare" because it doesn't carry any connotation of standards or responsibility.) I guess this guy is from a universe where everything is software, and a dead human being can be rebooted?

"If all she had to do was say this was a beta or whatever and all of us would be using it, would be loving it."

This argument doesn't make any sense. It wasn't a beta, nor an alpha, nor anything.

It was just a marketing gag without any substance or technology. As part of an alpha or beta, you need an actual pathway to a full release.

There was literally nothing. If this were released as a beta after having raised lots of money, people would call this a scam outright, because it didn't do anything new or more efficient.

> Blood testing is not a field where people accept mistakes.

I don't think this is true. There are blood tests that don't always work. Lyme disease is one that is not accurately detected.

Most blood tests are imperfect by nature (specificity and sensitivity are almost never equal to one). No need to point out a specific and very questionable example.

To clarify, a mistake is an error which causes the tests to be invalidated. Theranos had to throw out all Edison test results for 2014 and 2015. Clinical decisions were made as a result of these tests and it is not unreasonable to believe that patients may have been harmed as a result of faulty information. This would be the equivalent of a plane crash for an airliner.

False positives and false negatives will occur with all testing and there are protocols in place to detect false readings. While most tests are accurate, an inaccurate result is not considered a mistake since the tests themselves are not perfect. (Given that you followed proper procedure)

Another thing, independent of personalities. Theranos was well-funded. It built prototypes. Its engineering case was, “You can get sufficiently good testing S/N ratio with much, much smaller blood samples.” They couldn’t. Period. It remains an unsolved problem, just like stick-free blood sugar testing, which has consumed more than $1B of funding, I believe.

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