Curative’s Fred Turner: “A million tests a week”

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 8 May 2020

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Fred Turner, founder of Curative, to talk about creating a new coronavirus test (3:55), hiring 200 people in 7 weeks (5:35), what’s different about Curative’s test (7:10), how he got involved (10:40), who is backing him (13:25), starting with cows (16:00), then moving to STD’s (19:10), sepsis testing (25:20), coming from a tinkering family (26:), getting rejected by the NHS (29:00), the bottlenecks (33:10), moving to California as a teenager (35:20), raising money in a pandemic (37:30), singing up the US Air Force (41:00), and how he tests his employees (41:25).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Yo, technology.
0:02.9	What is it all about?
0:04.5	We test every single employee every day.
0:08.0	And we don't let new people on sites unless they have been tested or they're wearing
0:12.3	full PPE.
0:13.7	And then internally, we don't do any social distancing.
0:16.7	Oh, interesting.
0:21.3	Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley, your weekly dispatch from behind the scenes and
0:25.8	inside the minds of the top people in tech.
0:28.6	How are you all doing?
0:30.9	Hopefully staying safe, staying sane.
0:34.0	We are certainly doing our best out here.
0:37.1	And to that end, we bring you yet another pod and this
0:41.6	week we kind of have an amazing story to tell so on the program we have a guy called fred
0:47.4	turner he's 25 he's from yorkshire and he's the founder of curative a company that you have never heard of because
0:56.6	it didn't exist until a few months ago and what turner does what co-curative does is COVID testing
1:03.1	in fact this little startup is now providing more than a quarter of all testing in california so
1:10.0	about 10,000 tests a day and rising pretty
1:12.7	rapidly. It's just signed a huge contract with the U.S. Air Force, and amazingly, it's offered
1:17.9	its capabilities to the NHS in England more than a month ago, which of course, you know,
1:24.2	the NHS desperately needed and remains in need of tests.
1:27.8	But they rejected the offer, weirdly, so we can talk about that.
	...

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