Elizabeth Holmes was a 19-year-old, Stanford dropout when she founded Theranos, a healthcare technology startup in 2003. Her innovation and drive made the company very famous in Silicon Valley, obviously not an unimpressive feat. Her idea was simple: Elizabeth wanted to incorporate microfluidics and nanotechnology into a single patch where you could sample blood and detect an infection, then at that point, deliver antibiotics through it. Her Stanford professor told her that it was physically impossible when Elizabeth approached her to share the idea. But Miss Holmes was not to be stopped, and she was determined to revolutionize the world to bring down healthcare costs to make it accessible to every American. The laboratory industry at that time (back in 2003) was dominated by two companies: Quest and LabCorp. Between them, they controlled almost 80% of the market, their blood tests were always high and never transparent. They were sued for overcharging Medicaid and Medicare for billions of dollars. But the size of their operations, including the ability to do over a thousand different blood tests, made them difficult to challenge, until Elizabeth and her ideas came along.
To bring her strategy into life, Elizabeth and her employees at Theranos worked on a machine that could run over 60 tests with just a few drops of capillary blood, eliminating the fear of needles from the minds of its customers. The name of the machine was “The Edison” inspired by the famous inventor, Thomas Edison. The idea was to create a laboratory inside The Edison, one that would be no larger than a typical CPU and was easily available all over America. Initially, The Edison was to be used by the military to help wounded soldiers by carrying the machine in helicopters. Her theory was to also send The Edison machines to Pharmaceutical companies. Elizabeth wanted The Edison to be sold all over America – to become the iPhone of healthcare. After she dropped out of college, she needed investors to help her build the company. When Channing Robertson, Professor of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University heard Elizabeth’s idea and vision, he had an inkling he was dealing with something special. He left Stanford for Theranos, no doubt a very exceptional proposition had been brought to him by a very exceptional individual, and that her characteristics matched those of the greatest inventors like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. People believed that she was the next Steve Jobs. After she described her visions, the young entrepreneur found hope among the founding investors of Oracle, Don Lucas, Avie Tevanian (who was the former head of software at Apple) and Larry Ellison (Founder of Oracle). All of her investors had the same perception of her as Channing Robertson did. She tried to be friends with government officials so no one could raise concerns against her and so she could count on the support of both the military/armed forces and the government.
“The Edison” was developed to carry out more than 60 tests using a few drops of capillary blood.
In 2013, one of Theranos’ chief scientists, Ian Gibbons, committed suicide. Ian Gibbons had been progressively vocal about the inaccuracies of Theranos’ innovation. He received a phone call and was told Holmes wanted to meet with him the next day. Fearing he was about to be fired, Gibbons attempted to kill himself according to his wife. This alarmed Theranos employees, who now started to understand that The Edison was a faulty, complex machine that was not working properly and it could only run a few tests and the results were often incorrect. It couldn’t regulate the temperature properly, couldn’t reproducibly transfer fluids, and its designs were changed constantly to make it look sleek. There were a lot of fluids and handling them was hard because they spilt everywhere inside the machine. The Edison had problems with determining potassium and sodium levels and it was incapable of carrying out more than 80 tests. In 2014, Elizabeth introduced the “Theranos menu”, which allowed to perform more than 240 tests on The Edison (which was a huge mistake, considering how inaccurate the machine was). The device would sometimes stop working, and someone had to place their hand inside to make it work, which was dangerous knowing that there were punch holes inside it. Slowly, people started to realise that their results from The Edison were very different and inaccurate as compared to those which they got from other health centres. Elizabeth would never listen to employees and their remarks regarding the machine, and if asked to increase the size of the machine she would ask them to “leave” as they were not “Silicon Valley material”.
Thomas Edison was the first to practice the Silicon Valley art of “fake it till you make it”. More than a hundred years after Edison’s first moves, Elizabeth Holmes modelled her ambitious career after the great American inventor with the healthcare machine named after the man himself. Even though she knew her machine didn’t work she tried to market it as the greatest healthcare Eureka of all time, anyway. Elizabeth deceived people easily. At whatever point a VIP/investor visited Theranos office, a pinprick of their blood was placed in the Edison; when they left the premises, the blood test was immediately dispatched to a lab and prepared in a third-part machine. The company was exposed when two of its employees went on record to a Wall Street journalist regarding Holmes’ fraud. The journalist John Carreyrou, published the article and researched the actions of Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Holmes during her Ted talk
John Carreyrou opened the world’s eyes to the fakes behind the much-idealised Edison blood-testing device. His first report was distributed on The Wall Street Journal front cover in October 2015. That was the first time Theranos test results and their companies actions were questioned. Holmes was talented at deception if nothing else. She blamed Carreyrou for bogus claims. Validating Carreyrou’s intuitions, in 2016, Theranos pulled out all the test results from the years 2014 and 2015 and gave new, amended ones! He uncovered the report himself, which carried a genuine imprint on the organization’s standing. Because of his steady revealing, the world started to notice that The Edison machine gave incorrect results and that the founder was a fraud. By 2017, the entirety of Theranos labs shut down, acquiring a period of guile the name of medical care gadget to an end. The offenders didn’t go solid. Elizabeth Holmes and the leader of Theranos, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani were sued by the SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission).
Holmes’ idea could have revolutionized healthcare just like Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook had caused tremors in their respective fields. We need to realise that the laws of nature will never bend around us and that it is important to believe in the limits of physics. It was almost impossible to make The Edison work because they are very different components and elements inside a laboratory, you can’t fit everything inside a CPU-sized machine, as well as then proceed to use a drop of blood to do 240 other tests. Elizabeth decided to achieve her fame from her stories and ambitions. Stories have emotions, data doesn’t and emotions get people to do all kinds of things, good or bad.
