Bad Blood

Bad Blood is the story of how Elizabeth Holmes promised the world a medical miracle that actually operated on deception and lies.

This machine, called Edison, would not do what asserted, no matter how many endless hours the Theranos engineering team worked to meet the claim. The Edison could not test for any more than a handful of common illnesses. And even with that number, the accuracy of the data was questionable at best.

But Elizabeth Holmes was not concerned about any of these problems. She was only interested in playing her role as the charismatic Silicon Valley wunderkind.

Holmes fancied herself as something of a female Steve Jobs. She even affected a deeper voice when she spoke in public, thinking she’d be taken more seriously in a male-dominated business arena.

Her performance was enough for investors to begin taking note. They were convinced that Theranos was the next big thing to hitch their wagon to in the tech realm. To investors, Elizabeth Holmes was a brilliant businessperson who would soon amass a huge fortune by saving lives.

All the hype was contagious and soon heavyweight corporations like Walgreens and Safeway bought into the promise.

Safeway invested $350 million to renovate their stores to accommodate the Edison machines in their on-site clinics. Soon, other private investors jumped on the bandwagon. Before long, Theranos had a valuation of a cool $9 million.

There was so much pressure to get the Edison machines into the marketplace that the company didn’t consider spending money and more time in research and development. Who knows what they could have done if they had taken the time to further build it.

Yet Holmes continued talking it up and making outrageous claims, saying that the device could run 800 tests using only a single drop of blood. She also maintained that results could be given in under an hour and that that it was all approved by the FDA. Every word was just a dog and pony show.

The only test that this machine could perform was an immunoassay, which provides data on protein levels. Most hematology and general chemistry profiles were beyond the machine’s capabilities.

When customers arrived at a test center, they were told that their specific order called for the traditional method of blood extraction, using a large needle and vials.

Theranos then express-couriered the samples to a lab in Palo Alto and tested them on third-party machines. It was as if Theranos was making good on the claims, even though the whole operation was a “bloody” lie.