Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

Re:Elizabeth Holmes found guilty by ghshephard on Monday January 03, 2022 @09:52PM (#29790696)

I think that's entirely fine - both for patients and investors (Siemens might be a bit Irate, but I don't know if I would put that in the "Bad" category). The issue would be if they informed their investors that tests were being done on Theranos technology, but were actually using siemens technology. With regards to the patients - all they should care about is accuracy of test results - whether Theranos was doing it with Theranos tech, Siemens Tech, Reverse Engineered Siemens Tech + dilution of the blood to get enough volume is mostly irrelevant to a patient - they just want to get the highest quality information possible, regardless of the route taken.

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Re:Elizabeth Holmes found guilty by jmcgough on Monday January 03, 2022 @10:28PM (#29790944)

> Reverse Engineered Siemens Tech + dilution of the blood to get enough volume is mostly irrelevant to a patient

Those machines weren't designed to work that way though, so the test results were wildly inaccurate when they did dilutions. And they fired people who wanted to delay rollout in order to ensure that they had consistently accurate results.

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Re:Elizabeth Holmes found guilty by ghshephard on Tuesday January 04, 2022 @01:50AM (#29792118)

The point I was making was that it was irrelevant how the original designs were intended - if Theranos had been able to successfully reverse engineers the tests, and determine a way to make them work reliably, while it would have made those of us who believed Theranos had some incredible new technology, and that Elizabeth Holmes was the next coming, no patients need to have been concerned. It was the fact that the tests were unreliable, that made Theranos guilty.

Lying about it to the Investors, and possible intellectual/contract issues with Siemens are another issue.

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Re:Elizabeth Holmes found guilty by jmcgough on Tuesday January 04, 2022 @10:11AM (#29795567)

Yeah, I think we're actually in agreement here. Sometimes I think about how, if Theranos had figured out how to make things work over the last year before the WSJ article, all of their horrible and unethical practices would have been swept under the rug even if they were essentially lying for years to investors and patients.

Unfortunately, it turns out that "fake it til you make it" doesn't work with some problems that are seemingly unsolvable (at least by the approach they took).

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Re:Elizabeth Holmes found guilty by CRConrad on Friday January 07, 2022 @05:52PM (#29846017)

> Unfortunately, it turns out that "fake it til you make it" doesn't work with some problems that are seemingly unsolvable (at least by the approach they took).

IOW, it turns out that "fake it til you make it" doesn't work if you don't actually make it.

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Re:Elizabeth Holmes found guilty by josefx on Tuesday January 04, 2022 @04:11AM (#29792834)

> It was the fact that the tests were unreliable, that made Theranos guilty.

Very few tests are 100% reliable, so I would expect that Theranos claims about how the tests where performed would play a significant role in determining the guilt. People where told they would get the perfect magic pixy dust test that worked on one drop of blood instead they got one of the early covid tests that needed at least four repeats to give a "most likely negative" result, unsurprisingly the covid tests also resulted in confused tweets by the one or other VC.

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Re:Elizabeth Holmes found guilty by ghshephard on Tuesday January 04, 2022 @06:38AM (#29793751)

Well - some of the tests have to be 100% reliable, because medication decisions are made on them, and the incorrect dosage can be harmful. It's not like a cheap $10 antigen tests that has sub 100% specificity and sensitivity - a bunch of the tests were trying to measure particular levels. Theranos was just overall horrible. They were trying to do some tests that were impossible based on the physics of what can be measured by pinprick blood.

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