They could have just failed. Never produced a technology. Wasted a bunch of money and all would be fine. But messing up medical tests while you are "figuring it out" is unacceptable.

That is fair. It stings the most because the medical industry is known for it's transparency and rigorous testig standards. The FDA, famous champion of public health, was able to successfully stop 23&me (information terrorists) from providing harmful information to their patients as well. It makes sense tha Theranos should be singled out and villified for the failure of one of their beta devices that was i active development. Obviously, lieing about it wasn't super cool, but again their product "figures out and produces medical tests" so messing up your product(or procedures involving it) is === messing up medical testing.

I would have said the opposite - that the healthcare industry is known for its lack of transparency, with big pharma being notorious for their obfuscation.

i was being sarcastic. either way, given the threads discourse, moonshots seem to be a super unpopular idea except when google does it...

I also thought that you were being serious. There is a good reason people use explicit markers for sarcasm like: <sarcasm> </sarcasm>

I encourage you to look up Poe's law

I don't see an issue at hand of not investing in big ideas. In fact it has become clear that what has been invested in was ideas alone with insufficient substance.

But for healthcare there is a simple golden rule: Primum non nocere - First do no harm.

Theranos has broken this rule in an absolutely egregious way. I would hold no issue if they failed and that was that. It would be upsetting if someone got hurt because of some failures which were not picked up by regulatory adherence, but sometimes things happen and I wouldn't hold it against them. But to willfully hide the inaccuracy and poor performance of your healthcare product? To allow it to be marketed to doctors and the public as just as effective and accurate as existing tests?

I'm not certain if it is criminal, but I believe it at the very least should be. The individuals who have caused this to happen should be held responsible.

As for the uBeam & Theranos comparison, I don't believe it to be completely fair to Theranos. Had they had more time and not horribly cut corners as they had, then perhaps Theranos would have become the billion dollar world changing company it was hyped to be. There is still plenty of research and science that needs to be conducted in microfluidics before we can conclusively declare weather or not it can work.

But uBeam was dead on arrival. The core assumptions could be challenged with a basic understanding of physics. There's a big difference between, we don't know how to do something because the science is still being collected vs we know this won't work. Investors fell in love with a cavalier founder that had rebuffed the experts.

this is a reasonable counter claim and the middle ground I was looking for. Everyone pounces on Theranos, which was founded by a research student who dropped out of college in 03, which is 13 years ago. It irritates me that people come out in condemnation of Theranos like a foregone, obvious conclusion they would have been fully equipped to make 13 years ago.

Maybe they could have used the best search engine to do due dilligence[0]. Of course it was google, they had just taken 29% market share to eclipse yahoo by ~1%. So yeah, with 13 years of hindsight and a decade of research the 20 year old college whiz didn't build a successful company. Like you pointed out, there are a reasonable subset of things you should expect(even from a failing company) and I believe you are correct.

It would just be nice to see a bit more contemplative thought around Theranos. Quite obviously they made major mistakes, had some ethical violations which regardless of being par for the field are piss poor from a judgement and statistical validity standpoint, and other short comings.

I'll gladly be the person that says I would fund 5 Elizabeth Holmes if I could get 1 Elon Musk/Steve Wozniak/Bill Gates ect. and I think we all know, that would be too cheap a price.

[0]http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=218099

If you could manage a ratio of 5 big losses for one massive hit you'd be quite a successful investor indeed :)

Microfludics itself was still a young science at the time Holmes founded Theranos. It still is. I'm not sure if she could have really done due diligence that would have provided an insight how Theranos turned out at the time. I believe this was one of those try it and see if you can make it work science problems.

Having built a microfludics chip as a student, I do still think that there is plenty of promise the technology. I hope life science investors don't shy away from it. Just perhaps ask for more supporting evidence of claims. And extraordinarily evidence for extraordinarily claims.

I think the phenomena that you're seeing is a result of the kind of personally cargo cult that surrounds leaders like Holmes. As everyone sees the shadow of Icarus pass over them they marvel at his brilliance. Try to soak in every detail less they too can figure out how to soar just as high. And then when Icarus falls suddenly everyone who held him in such high esteem feel foolish. "I'm no fool, of course he was going to fall."

At least that's my theory.

I do empathize. I've been working on a product which started with very ambitious goals. It's been painful cutting out capability. I'm going to ship a product tomorrow that is less advanced than the designs and prototypes I have from a year ago. But it works consistently and I can use it as a the foundation from which to build upon. And if anything, I think the lesson from Theranos is that in healthcare the path to MT. Olympus must be a slow and steady climb. Skip a step or try to move forward before you have good footing where you are now and you'll fall.

I don't understand your reasoning about this. It's obviously not a big deal that the technology might be a sham. Who cares about the investors losing money.

It's a huge problem that they provided bogus results to patients.

Here's a simple mechanism they could have used to develop their testing technology: While doing the pilot research on the new technology, build up an excellent lab practice using existing tech. Once the pilot tech is ready for wider testing, start using those delicious VC bucks to offer patients a trade; in exchange for a lower price on the excellent traditional testing, they allow you to use their sample to test the new tech against the existing tech.

So the moonshot doesn't requires exposing patients to any additional risk at all.

Call it research and just say we're not launching a product until we figure this out, even if it costs us a hundred mil. That is OK. Minimum Viable Producting your way in a space like this is NOT OK.

That is where they effed up and that is why she is liable. Imagine a car manufacturer falsifying information about a faulty brake in a new line of cars.

uBeam's only crime is hyping their half-baked product tooo much.

I'd suggest it isn't even a Minimum Viable Product. That at least implies some sort of working diagnostic.

> I still believe in the idea of Theranos

Several studies suggest that small volumes of blood have too much variance to yield useful test results.

Would you mind including those? As a non medical expert, nor physicist it doesn't seem implausible that medical testing can be improved 10x from where it is and many other competitors to Theranos seem to be raising capital (Healthtell >25M recently) so the consensus doesn't seem to be insurmountable && obviously scientifically impossible. Again, I am not favourably comparing Holmes to Musk, but it is narrowly physically possible to go to mars, certainly we have a bit more clarity on local testing of blood.

> Several studies suggest that small volumes of blood have too much variance to yield useful test results.

That's misrepresenting it a bit. Currently there are zero blood tests that have a 100% accuracy therefore if you can't do a normal test with an accuracy near 100% you're not going to be able to do it with a smaller subset of data.

However, if we get to the point of 100% accuracy (or at least near) then there is no reason why those types of tests couldn't be useful. But yes today they are not.

It's also possible to question the idea the idea that are testing leads to better outcomes in the first place.

It's not 'we have no idea how to do this' impossible, it's physically and technically impossible?

Judging from what I read in comments on Derek Lowe's blog, the problem is not so much being able to do blood tests on µL of blood (which I suspect we might have the technology to do; whether it's cost-effective is a different question) but rather that the way you get only a little bit of blood screws up the results--you're extracting more from capillaries than veins, and you get more contamination from skin and other tissue cells.

What about big ideas that hurt people?

Those are usually called medical trials. And the people participating in them have reason to believe their participation may not be dependable. This is not what Theranos was selling.

Idk to be honest. I have been able to morally justify using electricity, nuclear energy, certainly all of the "modern medicine" I enjoy at other people from histories expense, ect.