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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

I'm sort of sad about this. I liked having a well known company headed by (and founded by) a woman to hold up as an example for my daughter. There are other billion dollar companies headed by women, but I think this was the only "science" one other than 23andme?

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Theranos was a running scandal for the past year of two, it's the last kind of company, and last kind of woman you'd want to use as example for your daugther.

Show her Jennifer Doudna instead, a woman who apparently gave us CRISPR/Cas9 - one of the biggest breakthroughs of recent years, if not decades.

Jennifer is an amazingly successful and brilliant person. But, let's not forget Emmanuelle Charpentier. She is the one who spent over a decade peering at the amazingly strange and esoteric pieces of the puzzle that when eventually pieced together became the story that we all now know as CRISPR. She persevered when the world scientific community yawned at her bizarrely focused "sequence gazing". Many thought she was just finding patterns where randomness/happenstance would guarantee such fake patterns would naturally occur if you looked hard enough. Jennifer and her group, to be sure, contributed a lot to realize the end result, but Dr. Charpentier's contributions were the necessary foundation.

Haven't heard of her, so thanks a lot for bringing Dr. Charpentier's name forward!

This only shows there's plenty more women that are unsung heroes of science to discover!

And let's not forget Virginijus Šikšnys either, who discovered CRISPR-Cas9 independently at the exact same time but whose paper got rejected repeatedly until it was finally published three months later than Doudna et al.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/prestigious-prize-ov...

Uhhhhhh.... In the biomedical space, off the top of my head, the CEO of GlaxoSmithKline is female (Emma Walmsley)

But why in the fuck would you want to hold up someone who has been indicted on criminal fraud as an example for your daughter?

You could be happy that there is a story of a modern day pirate and scoundrel scamming the most powerful people in the world, and she is a woman.

Does Jessica Livingston of Y Combinator not count? Is being one of the co-founders of a $100 billion tech incubator not sciency enough for you?

I don't think an investment company counts as finance, though I agree the line is a bit blurred when it comes to private equity. Otherwise, you might need to throw in Abby Johnson, since she owns Fidelity and Fidelity is a major investor in Uber and many other pre-IPO (and post-IPO for that matter) companies.

Jessica is already on my list, but she’d be the first to tell you she’s not sciency. :)

Silly question: How sciency was Holmes? Did she personally help develop her (completely fraudulent) blood tests? Or was she merely a business woman in charge of bringing this bag of hot air to market?

(Hint: I don't really care if she supposedly helped develop it. It didn't actually work. She's not some kind of genuine scientist.)

I'm just gonna leave this here and suggest that most of whatever tech was developed by these 1000+ still active companies likely wouldn't have made it to market without YC:

https://yclist.com

(Also, this isn't intended as snark. I'm just cranky at the moment and seriously cannot see why it matters that Jessica "isn't sciency." My crankiness is for wholly unrelated reasons and has nothing to do with this discussion.)

How sciency was Holmes? Not very. She dropped out of college after one year. Although many people have had great success in software with this level of education, it's kinda hard to imagine somebody making major contributions to the life sciences without even a bachelor's degree.

I would say not at all.

Not really a good example for your daughter to be honest...

Nor is 23andme.

Well, I think we can generalize that to many Tech Companies in general, if you examine their "value add" Google, FB, Linked-In, etc. There is something unappealing in quite a few. Not that each one is _all_ bad, but many have at least _some_ bad. in them. G and FB obviously trade in user data. On the other hand AMZ leverages many lowly-paid warehouse workers. Netflix is unapologetic about getting people to "binge", they don't even apologize for the word binge (which is typically associated with unhealthy alcoholic intake).

Yet, they all add some good value to many people as well, despite those flaws.

Why is that? I'm out of the loop.

I mean 23andme seems (to some) to originally have been a vanity project funded by Google founder's massive money to give wife something to do (super over the top uncharitable, misogynistic, chauvinistic characterization to answer the "why is that? question). However they have pivoted to something very interesting lately. They are now a drug development company and have hired some of the best in the business to mine their data and develop novel therapeutics. They have Germaine Fuh! 23andme is now a cool company!

They were hawking "genome analysis"[1] that were of dubious accuracy, value, and most importantly, not FDA approved. The FDA told them to stop.

[1] dunno if thats the technical term.

The "health" tests were of dubious accuracy, but as a long-time customer I always thought their warnings and caveats about those tests were enough. I was sad when the FDA made them stop. However, since the FDA action and the recent restoration of the health tests the product has improved, so I guess the FDA's move was was for the best.

The genetics component has always been terrific. I've had friends uncover surprises, like one who unraveled a mystery about an undocumented and unmentioned great-grandfather, who they found out was from a different continent and shunned by the family.

Even though I work in the 'omics field, I'm still amazed every time I get an email from 23andme that a sibling or cousin has joined, with them determining that based on nothing but some spit.

I think it's a very exciting company to watch and it's just getting started.

Well yeah that was my point. :)

How about Lisa Su at AMD?

That’s engineering not science. Still a good suggestion though!

At some point, engineering becomes science. I am not qualified to really opine on this particular aspect of engineering v. science, but if she is developing new methodologies that are really on the cutting edge, then it's science, even if it's engineering science.

CEO of pharmaceutical company GSK.

Didn't know that. It prompted me to Google other women CEOs of megacorps, and here's what I found:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_women_CEOs_of_Fortune_...

24/500 (4.8%) may seem not that much, but it's growing; a lot of "first female CEO of company X" shows up in linked articles.

Excellent, thanks!

How many startup founders are scientists? Not including engineers and computer scientists, I mean. And how many startup founders are female? So it's not surprising that there aren't many.

23 and me had the ex wife of Google as the founder. Not exactly the same as the Theranos story.

Time is coming where we will have many companies founded by Women hit these valuations. Maybe it’ll be your daughter.

> 23 and me had the ex wife of Google as the founder

Among many things corporations can't do that natural persons can is marry.

What happens in a merger?

Tho its predominantly males there are many women who are leading or lead large businesses. Meg Whitman for example, lead eBay from 30 employees to 15000.

The unique feature of Holmes was that she was the first woman starting and leading a (supposedly successful) start-up. Needless to say though, it was a facade. That's saddening, but having read Bad Blood I expected nothing less but the company Theranos to dissolve.

Gwynne Shotwell (COO of SpaceX)

Surely equality means equally capable of bad deeds as well as good?

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