CONFIRMED
Theranos and the Drop of Blood That Wasn't There
Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford at nineteen to build a company around an idea that sounded like the future: a small machine that could run a comprehensive battery of medical tests — hundreds of them — from a single drop of blood drawn painlessly from a finger-prick, cheaply and instantly, in any pharmacy or home. She called the company Theranos, dressed in a black turtleneck in conscious imitation of Steve Jobs, and spoke in a deep voice about democratising health care and saving lives. Silicon Valley believed her. So did some of the most powerful men in America, who joined her board: former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former defense secretary James Mattis, and others. So did the pharmacy giant Walgreens, which put Theranos blood-testing centres in its stores. By 2014 the company was valued at around nine billion dollars and Holmes, on paper, was the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world, hailed on magazine covers as the next Jobs. There was only one problem, and it was the whole problem: the machine did not work. It could not do what she claimed, it never had, and inside the company the tests on real patients were secretly being run, badly, on ordinary commercial analysers — producing results so unreliable that people received dangerously wrong information about their own blood. Theranos was not a brilliant idea that failed; it was, a court would eventually find, a fraud. This article tells the story of how a company built on a drop of blood that wasn't there fooled so many for so long, who finally exposed it, and what it revealed about the culture that made it possible.
