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Comment by umichguy | Hacker News Reader

Theranos should be a case study of how not to, for a long time to come in tech firms - especially, those dealing with real-life humans in the healthcare arena.

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Even more, Theranos should be a case study for investors. People in the industry were calling out Theranos' nonsense for many years before the whole thing finally collapsed.

I'd really like to know if investors were just oblivious or if they genuinely believed that Holmes could fake it until she made it.

People in the industry were calling out Theranos' nonsense for many years

People in the industry enabled Theranos. You don’t make deals with Walgreens and Safeway without people in the industry backing you.

Of course, there were fair number of doubters. But when the likes of Mayo Clinic lend their name to anything from Theranos, it’s safe to say an important part of the industry backed it.

Given most of them have f.you money and no interest in thinking about those pesky details like physics and chemistry (hello ubeam) I doubt they will worry about this for more than 5 minutes.

Eh, they were shorts, pushing their negative spin. /s

I think the media and social justice movement also played a role. I distinctly remember people with very relevant credentials stating that it was impossible to obtain accurate clinical result from such tiny amounts of blood.

The mainstream media and social media mobs (even here to some degree), immediately chided them as sexist basement-dwelling neckbeards, envious that this young female Steve Jobs of science was showing that the evil patriarchy no longer had power to keep women out of STEM. Of course, not a single apology or retraction was ever issued.

I don't remember any of the white knighting you're talking about. Do you have an actual reference to these kinds of attacks being made, on here or in a major news publication?

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