After the company launched professionals in the medical testing said it was impossible. I believe it was even posted to HN. They stated it was impossible to get the results they would get from the amount of blood given.
I guess that‘s HN still in full fanboy mode, before all those startups started to display their dark sides.
I wonder if he/she was from Nanomix (nano.com, another company working on similar technology since 2000)
We don't know that. You can only downvote comments for a day(?).. but you can upvote forever. Considering it's been 5 years, and people keep linking to his comment... it's hard to say if he gained those points that day or years later after theranos was found to be a fraud.
> What stops the skeptics from doing their own tests by walking into a service center and having their blood analyzed for all tests possible and doing the same with their blood for conventional tests? Or an even large scale test?
> If their concern is genuine (rather than a way to get a look under the hood of a competitor for the current sellers of such services) there are multiple ways in which they could get their verification without inside information on how Theranos does its thing.
Edit: For that reason, most of this "I told you so" sounds like hindsight bias if it comes from someone who would normally take the attitude of "fake it till you make it", "don't wait until you're sure you have a working product".
I was incredibly sceptical about a 19 year old with no experience starting a biotech company. All of my comments had a large number of upvotes (for 2015), while many of the people disagreeing with me were downvoted into the negatives.
The hard part is to do it in a way consistent with the rhetoric about “fake it till you make it”/“it’ll all work out”/“all self doubt is impostor syndrome”.
There's a sizeable contingent on HN that is sceptical of that mindset in general, which was my point.
I find the self-driving, or near-future Mars colony fanboyism here a little harder to take, because a much larger segment of the user base should know better.
“There are more soldiers in that board there than doctors” is one of the original comments!
It would make me feel somewhat better about the whole mess to know this was the case. A successful Theranos would have been the best thing to come out of SV since the Apple II. It was sad to see it fail because of executives' delusions.
There were numerous research papers on the topic, and some time spent with experts in the field would have also pointed her in the direction of the current research.
Almost too late she hired an expert from Abbott Diagnostics (who headed up a number of successful system projects for them), and he walked away after 6 months.
> In addition, the small volumes involved and the variability in sample quality based on puncture site and technique make capillary sampling particularly susceptible to errors during the pre-preanalytical phase, which are beyond the control of clinical laboratory personnel
It is well known to any diabetic, or to anyone who played for a few minutes with a blood glucose monitor.
Turns out in this case they were right.
I remember a ton of doubt, after launch, that it would be successful, but those people weren't really experts.
> RIM had a complete internal panic when Apple unveiled the iPhone in 2007, a former employee revealed this weekend. The BlackBerry maker is now known to have held multiple all-hands meetings on January 10 that year, a day after the iPhone was on stage, and to have made outlandish claims about its features. Apple was effectively accused of lying as it was supposedly impossible that a device could have such a large touchscreen but still get a usable lifespan away from a power outlet.
http://www.macnn.com/articles/10/12/27/rim.thought.apple.was...
And her actions demonstrated she had done no such thing. Buying, hiding, deceiving around traditional venipuncture machines, etc.
This is someone who "had a dream", had connections, and was determined and stubborn, in a bad way. Even now she, and one or two of investors, still believe she has been robbed and wronged, and that the world is worse off without Theranos.