This snippet is amazing:
"Theranos kept up the illusion that they were running a lot of the tests from finger-stick blood draws by hacking the Siemens machines to work with small samples"
No wonder they had so many inaccurate test results.
"Theranos kept up the illusion that they were running a lot of the tests from finger-stick blood draws by hacking the Siemens machines to work with small samples"
No wonder they had so many inaccurate test results.
Theranos would dilute the finger stick draws, and then run them on the Siemens machines 5 times. In theory, you could then calculate the concentration, and adjust for the dilution. In reality, the diluted samples would have concentrations of the relevant cells and elements that were too low to pick up.
To “fix” this, they would do those 5 runs, then calculate the median. And, if you had 5 outliers in all different directions, they’d discard the run and do 5 again.
The fact that PhDs and doctors who swore the Hippocratic oath allowed this to go on for over a year is shocking.
Cue someone replying and telling me why I was actually the one that was wrong ;-) But the point is that even well educated people make really, really stupid mistakes.
I think I may be being a bit unfair to the scientists. Basically, Theranos was a hot enough startup that Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani would fire, demote, or marginalize anyone who made a fuss. Lifelong academics may have never had to deal with that kind of bullying/pressure before.
On the other hand, they had some pretty incredible scientific talent on staff. You would think that people who are highly cited and have a reputation to protect would have spoke up sooner. Instead, the first two people to make any kind of sustained fuss were two fresh out of college hires.
Such is the nature of competing in a status-economy.
Knowing how to work within the system is probably how they were afforded the chance to build this reputation int the first place. It's possible they were trying to do the same here but didn't realize the fundamental differences between the academic system and the commercial one.
Fresh college grads haven't yet learned how to "not make waves", which is a blessing and a curse.