The better analogy would be Musk indiscriminately enabling full self-driving in every Model 3, claiming its Level 5 as is, and encouraging drivers to sit in the back with a blindfold on.
Holmes was always full of shit, and a "big breakthru" in this area is impossible, as there is ample evidence that capillary blood at these volumes is simply not homogeneous enough to give accurate results for quantitative tests.
Let's revisit Holmes claims in 15 years. Unless you want to argue that there will never be any progress made in terms of blood tests???
> everyone was laughing because back then the batteries density made it impossible for battery to be lightweight enough to be carried in a normal sized car.
That's simply untrue. The issue was always recognized to be economic, not a physical impossibility issue. There were a bunch of (crappy) electric cars in the 90s.
With respect to Theranos, impossible as in it is physically impossible, because of the non-homogeneity of capillary blood. It simply doesn't matter how good your blood test is, if you are doing a quantitative test, for many types of tests you can simply not get good enough accuracy doing a finger prick test.
The crazy thing is, you don't have to consult biomedical engineers or pore over leading-edge research papers to discover this. You just need to ask almost any med tech with a modicum of experience with blood tests. They will tell you, in no uncertain terms, that Blood Does Not Work That Way.
I will never understand the lack of due diligence performed by the Theranos investors. There couldn't possibly have been any due diligence at all. It's very hard to avoid slipping into victim-blaming mode in any conversation about this company.
She received justice for being a charlatan.
No, there won't. I feel the need to keep repeating this because for some reason many people seem to conflate "it is not possible with current technology" with "it is a physical impossibility". Doing accurate quantitative blood tests with a finger prick is a physical impossibility.
All that said, one thing that made me especially mad about Theranos is that a lot of their ideas, e.g. one small, portable machine that can run tons of tests; simplified, consumer-accessible pricing; access at neighborhood pharmacies, etc., had a ton of value even if accomplished with venous blood draws. But instead Holmes' delusions of grandeur forced her to hang everything on the fraudulent, and impossible, "must be done with a finger prick" idea.
That "discovery" (hypothetical) could then be repurposed to build a small machine that does what Holmes thought it could. Not that she thought about stuff like that - she was designing their stupid building instead.
The point I was making was that not knowing now and then saying will will know later at which point "someone becomes right" is a biased way of thinking. My point was not to say there will or won't be, which is why I used "may be".
That's pretty gullible given her history to date. 2 years before a breakthrough spells 'never', that's exactly how the rest of the investors got bilked.
There's a difference, Musk is wealthy and has mostly swindled consumers and retail investors, while Holmes wasn't wealthy and mainly swindled the wealthy.