Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

A consistent push toward animal rights in the West has made research on primates increasingly

fraught, yet monkeys hold valuable secrets, and as countries such as China and Japan press

ahead, there will be scientific and strategic consequences.

And we take a look at a new translation of a lost book by Simone de Beauvoir, a celebrated feminist philosopher.

It reveals just how much a childhood friendship shaped both her personal and her professional life.

First up, though, Elizabeth Holmes once graced the covers of magazines such as Forbes, gave talks at tech-savvy conferences like Ted, mixed with the political and Silicon Valley elite.

Now, she's about to stand trial as soon as a sufficiently balanced jury can be found.

Theranos, the startup she founded in 2003, claimed to revolutionize the process of blood testing,

and in so doing to alter health care itself.

We've created these little tiny tubes, which are designed to replace the big traditional

tubes, and instead allow for all the testing to be done from a tiny drop from a finger.

She raised hundreds of millions of dollars to manufacture those tiny tubes and struck

deals to ship them to pharmacies across America.

By 2015, the company was valued at $9 billion, and Ms. Holmes was a media darling.

Then Vice President Joe Biden dropped by, calling the company the future of laboratory science.

The way lab tests have been done have been extremely expensive.

They've been inconvenient to literally get them done.

But then, the story came undone, thanks in largest part to Wall Street Journal reporter John Kerryru.

She commercialized a product, a medical product, that she knew did not work.

Her machine only did a handful of tests that did not do them well at all.

A year later, the company fell apart and a new narrative took hold

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