Many people are working very hard on solving these problems. Holmes simply claimed to have solved them all with one machine. They never had any idea of how to actually do that, never even tried. It wasn't like "If we use this new development in nanotechnology we might be able to...". It was just entirely made up, the whole time.

If I falsely claim to have invented a warp drive, I don't get credit for whatever work people do in that area in the future.

Not exactly how it works. There are lot of brilliant people working on lot of good stuff, very few get funding to do meaningful work. The job of someone like Holmes is to bring that funding.

Holmes was an agent to energize the industry in the sense that she was instrument to attracting a lot of new VC investors willing to throw money and experiment with new tech like this . I doubt she personally claimed to have invented anything new, even had Theranos succeeded her claim to fame would be only building the organization that enabled such innovation and not the innovation itself.

Even though Theranos failed as firm, a lot of smart people got funding to work on interesting projects while there and potentially either developed or started developing products because of holmes being able keep them and Theranos funded. A lot of new people are getting funding, because Theranos and Holmes opened this industry to VC funding when it was not traditionally so.

To your example, if you falsely claim to invent a warp drive, raise a lot of money, hire a lot of smart people who do interesting work while working for you, eventually fail as company and those people go on to build parts of the drive partly with experience they gained in your research. This kind of research was not well funded before you, Likely without you this would have never been a VC funded industry don't you have some hand in that ?

Do you think it's easier for people to raise money in the blood testing space now after this very high profile fraud? I've heard people say that it makes things much more difficult.

Also, Holmes's lies sucked up a ton of funding at the time. Not just the money given to her, but the investors who said "theranos already dominates blood testing, so we'll invest in another space"

This was a disaster all around for everyone but her.

>This was a disaster all around for everyone but her.

I don't know how you can say that, some of the trial evidence was heart breaking. Some of the emails, the texts back and forth between her and Sunny, what a mess, it sounded like she was totally losing her mind and stressed out to no end while being pushed and cajole by an unreasonably intense person behind the scenes. She was clearly devastated when the company collapsed, she very clearly believed in what she was doing, and now she is going to jail. That sound like beyond a disaster, it sounds like hell.

She clearly believed in what? The vision of low cost, multi function blood testing? Maybe she did, but she made almost no progress toward that goal. All while accepting credit for having already accomplished it. Not to mention that she's been living the lifestyle of a multi millionaire the whole time.

She's a human being and it is a sad situation. But this is justice.

Read the comments. Nobody cares how she feels now. Everybody cares only about their own opinion they have the need to express. For her it’s all devastating, for resonable people too, for majority of shitty people the main thing ia to grow in their own eyes while barking at someone else.

True, and there are chemistry tests that would probably be reasonably testable. For instance, blood glucose is already testable from a finger prick, so that’d be just fine. Still, a lot of people with the background to have informed opinions have spoken up to say that some of her claims weren’t possible on a theory basis, not just because of an engineering challenge.