How a Reporter Pierced the Hype Behind Theranos
&gt; ...Theranos also played a role in the passage of an Arizona law that allows people to get blood tests without a doctor’s order. Carreyrou: That was controversial, because there are many in the medical profession [...] who say, &quot;Well, how is that progress?&quot; [...] more likely than not, they&#x27;re going to need a doctor&#x27;s opinion to decipher them.<p>This is a good point. Diabetics usually go to the doctor 1-3 times a day to have bloodwork done. Surprisingly, despite how open the medical field is from a regulatory, technological and informational standpoint we have done almost nothing to combat the complexity of tests taken regularly by most of the population. I would have overlooked this and I am glad the author brought this up, maybe it would be possible for users to be trained on some of the newer technology being rolled out in the medical field like the Facsimile Machine (often called FAX or sometimes by the synecdoche XeroX) to communicate with highly skilled professionals, to interpret the data. It is likely that every person would fall outside of a standard bell curve so it would be impossible to teach anyone how to interpret the test, but we could set our sites on leveraging FAX in the future.<p>&gt; How a Reporter Pierced the Hype ...<p>This is great reporting and a perfectionist usecase for new media. The journalist was able to quickly go on wikipedia to create a paragraph of color, and then link to the interview so that readers would be able to immeadiately hear how this reporter had broken the hype machine over a 20 minute interview at an offsite location. Maybe, unlike everyone else, you actualy don&#x27;t have 20 minutes to listen to this interview, perfect contingency here 3 bullet points.<p>Much like the author, I skipped around through the clip pulling random qoutes, the reporter is asked:<p><i>A number of reports got tips and yoiu were the one to purse this. Other reporters got tips as well but you pursued this?</i><p>Not knowing much about how the Peer review system, I called my colleague G. oog LeSearch Barr who confirmed peer review is basically the only important thing about conducting science, and the system is renowned for it&#x27;s perfection.<p>The reporter did say 2 people in the community had spoken out, which to be fair, is quite reasonable. He was pragmatic about waiting to fully engage with the story until, and I am paraphrasing but editorializing much less than one would think:<p>The 9 Billion in 2014 is a big valuation.<p>How did this unicorn get money?<p>What people saw other than Holme&#x27;s pitch isn&#x27;t clear. I have <i>heard</i> the company didn&#x27;t offer anything about how the technology worked.<p>After a lot of reporting, I talked to a lot of employees who were in a position to know, I determined that 350 blood samples 15 were run on their machine.<p>---<p>Now it is important to realize, Theranos didn&#x27;t use the AMA standard bootstrap medical breakthrough CDN and while not much is known about the internals of the company, it is believed they didn&#x27;t spin up a AWS Full Scale Research Labratory, they may have not even <i>considered</i> using GO.<p>Now, all that can be forgiven, right? But it is such a shame they didn&#x27;t just roll this out overnight. It is fucking trivial to build this, you can just use Crimson on Beaker for the front arm and then persist your regularatory data to the USFDADEAFBI?SOMESENATOR.gov&#x2F;api and get approval.<p>750 million dollars to basically build a crud app seems like a lot of investment. Obviously Holmes, much like her predecessor Alexander the great, had to hire Michael R. Taylor the Head of the FDA to follow her around saying &quot;You are just a human, only a mortal&quot;. Notably, this actually should have helped Theranos as Taylor is a renowned scientist who has won a nobel peace prize. He graduated with a degree in political science doing pretty serious research as a staff attorney at the FDA, and working with the private firm that represents the worlds biggest provider of open source seeds, Monsanto.<p>As an aside, Taylor is a New York Times best selling author for his riveting 1988 article entitled &quot;The De Minimis Interpretation of the Delaney Clause: Legal and Policy Rationale&quot;, where his interpretation of a 1958 law about the ppm of chemicals, is considered truly breathtaking when read.<p>----<p>She may not succeed, she may (we DO NOT KNOW) have cheated, but what fucking world do we live in if we can preach &quot;Fail Fast&quot; to the 40th uberPetBNBPariscopeAOLtimewarnerTwitterBlockchain-#NOBACKDOOR-google-earth-for-mars-but-with-instagram-filters<p>and tell the people who are fucking trying to push forward the most highly regulated industry forward, which requires not only innovation but capex, and a strong board (Kissinger&#x2F;etc are there to lobby because you CAN&quot;T EVEN COMPETE without someone connected, much less succeed).<p>So you can question her ethics, her strategy, etc, and if she committed fraud I certainly wouldn&#x27;t defend that, but if it ends up she took a shot at something big and missed, I vote we let the next guy or girl take a similar shot.