Why Theranos’s blood-testing claims were always too good to be true

Science Weekly

The Guardian

Science

4.2 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 13 January 2022

⏱️ 16 minutes

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Summary

Last week, the tech CEO Elizabeth Holmes – once described as ‘the next Steve Jobs’ – was convicted of fraud, and could face decades in prison. Her now collapsed company, Theranos, promised to revolutionise medicine with a machine that could run hundreds of health tests on just a pinprick of blood. Those claims have since been exposed as false – but could they ever have been true? Madeleine Finlay speaks to the Guardian’s wealth correspondent, Rupert Neate, about Silicon Valley’s trial of the century, and pathologist Dr Benjamin Mazer about why Theranos’s vision seemed impossible from the start. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/sciencepod

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the Guardian. You might not have heard the name Elizabeth Holmes, but not so long ago the Silicon Valley
0:18.0	CEO was gracing the covers of magazines and giving extensive media interviews about her new technology.
0:27.0	First, we've created these little tiny tubes, which we call the nanotainers which are designed to replace the big
0:37.3	traditional tubes that come from your arm and instead allow for all the testing to be done from a tiny drop from a finger.
0:45.3	But after a meteoric rise to fame and fortune came an equally spectacular fall.
0:53.9	Last week, inside a Californian courthouse,
0:57.2	Elizabeth Holmes was found guilty of conspiring to defraud her investors out of billions.
1:04.1	The verdict is in the disgrace Therinos founder and CEO found guilty
1:10.9	on four of 11 counts in her landmark Silicon Valley fraud case.
1:15.2	The jury reaching a verdict just moments ago after seven days of deliberations.
1:20.1	The story starts back in 2003, when Holmes founded Perenos, a company that had the revolutionary aim
1:28.4	of running all kinds of health tests using only a tiny sample of blood.
1:33.0	A health care pioneer is being compared to
1:35.5	visionaries like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
1:38.0	This morning Elizabeth Holmes is part of the new Time 100 list just out. By 2014, Therinos had made Holmes, the world's youngest
1:47.8	self-made female billionaire.
1:50.0	This is a revolutionary company that threatens to change health care the same way that Amazon changed retail or Intel and Microsoft changed computing or Apple yes change the cell phone. It could be that huge and you might be checking it out yourself at a Walgreens near you.
2:04.0	The trouble was, the technology didn't work.
2:08.0	Claims of being able to run a suite of tests on a pinprick of blood
2:12.0	were false.
2:13.7	And now Holmes, who pleaded not guilty and is expected to appeal,
2:18.4	could face decades in prison. So why were Perenos's blood tests too good to be true?
	...

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