Theranos Faces Congressional Inquiry Over Faulty Blood Tests (techcrunch.com) 186
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. House of Representatives sent a letter to blood analysis startup Theranos asking for them to explain their failure in providing accurate results to patients using its proprietary blood test technology. The company has faced serious backlash after government and regulatory agencies questioned the results of their proprietary 'Edison' machine, that the company claimed could detect hundreds of diseases using a single drop of blood. Not only have the feds proposed banning founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes and the company president Sunny Balwani from the blood-testing business for two years, but Holmes' net worth has been cut from $4.5 billion to zero. Most recently, Walgreens decided to cut ties with the company. House Democrats Frank Pallone, Gene Green and Diana DeGette sent the letter on June 30th, asking Holmes to explain what went wrong, what steps the company is taking to help medical professionals and patients who might have been affected by the manipulated results, and how Theranos plans to comply with regulators. "Given Theranos' disregard for patient safety and its failure to immediately address concerns by federal regulators, we write to request more information about how company policies permitted systemic violations of federal law," reads the letter. Theranos says it plans to clear things up with these lawmakers.
Put that bitch in Jail (Score:4, Insightful)
Why are we even bothering with enquiries?
There is so much documented fraud.
One county. Two classes.
She was just extremely careless (Score:2)
At this point, what difference does it make?
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In all seriousness, while the Bush administration did some bad things related to email and record-keeping, and ideally they'd be prosecuted for them, what Hillary did was different. Some rules were more fully spelled out by the time she got into office (and yes, I know they updated the requirements to be even clearer after she left), and her treatment of classified material was shameful.
I smell a rotten fish (Score:3, Interesting)
How in the world did these people get a license to begin with? Well. now we got this, and the MRI fiasco [slashdot.org]. I'm trying to figure out what's next on the list.
Re:I smell a rotten fish (Score:4, Informative)
How in the world did these people get a license to begin with?
Bribes.
Re:I smell a rotten fish (Score:5, Interesting)
How in the world did these people get a license to begin with?
Have you looked at Theranos' Board of Directors? It's stacked with seriously connected people from the Military-Industrial Complex. Who knows what kind of strings they pulled.
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Sorry, but statistics are not evil. It's just that evil people can use them to lie with.
OTOH, the MRI thing so far looks like a program bug that nobody bothered to check for a LONG time. It doesn't look like an intentional problem. Was the code open source? It probably wouldn't have mattered, though, because nobody who didn't have a machine would have any reason to look at the code.
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The same way Tesla is allowed to put "beta" autonomous driving abilities into a production car.
How else do you expect them to test it?
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With crash test dummies, of course!
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Does this imply that there are no other changes in the metabolism that accompany the changes in cholesterol levels? I suspect that there are, and that you could use those. Or that you could measure the level of un-globulated cholesterol and that it would be in proportion to the level of cholesterol globules, sort of the way fragments of protein are measured in urine. It would probably need to be a much more accurate test, but that's not surprising, and not necessarily impossible. A nano-scale chromatogr
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That's not what they did. That's not an answer. But that's one possible way to do what they claimed without being a fraud. What was missing before was the machine learning to get good reference outputs. So the en
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The real question we should ask (Score:4, Insightful)
Is why CMS paid and continued to allow Theranos to accept tests that were being subbed out, basically just scalping a profit.
There will away be snake-oil sellers where there are buyers with more money than sense but isn't that WHY CMS WAS CREATED??
It's yet another amazing wholesale fleecing of taxpayer by members of "the club".
Small Government? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Libertarians" take note.
Being free to scam others without consequence doesn't do a lot for the liberty of those being scammed.
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It's not that libertarians think companies should be free to scam others without consequence. It's that they believe that by applying the magical fairy-dust of a "free market" that nobody will be able to scam because competition will create a perfect utopia where all the billionaires are good, the criminals are beautiful and the CEOs are all above average.
Re:Small Government? (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is why other libertarians do see a role for government to provide some ground rules and provide oversight to actually enforce those rules. Even if only because it's far cheaper than letting fraudsters run wild.
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All of these assumptions revolve around something nobody ever discusses. Would there be competition at all?
In a new field, be it air travel or vehicle design or blood tests, how does the market 'choose' when only the inventor exists?
Lets pretend for a moment that we've abolished patents as well so that everyone can just copy the ideas they see -- why would most modern inventors bother?
I'm not talking about people who invent things because they're just brilliant and want to, I'm talking about people who get
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Abolition of patents would affect how corporations spend money, but wouldn't affect the general level of advancement. You forget how much is done by universities then sold to a single private company to exploit.
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Some libertarians have a naïve belief that in a free market, good honest companies will always prevail over fraudsters. And they are not completely wrong... in the long run. Fraud generally is discovered eventually and bad companies get replaced with better ones, but often not before massive damage has been wrought. And where one fraudster succeeds even for a while, others will try and follow in his footsteps.
Which is why other libertarians do see a role for government to provide some ground rules and provide oversight to actually enforce those rules. Even if only because it's far cheaper than letting fraudsters run wild.
ALL libertarians believe the government has a role in providing ground rules and oversight. It's one of the only legitimate functions of government - contract enforcement. See above for more information.
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NO libertarians believe the government has a role in providing ground rules and oversight.
FTFY. Some people who think they are libertarians, but actually aren't, hold the mistaken belief that an organization defined by its deliberate use of non-defensive force has any legitimate role to play. Not only is this belief not shared by "ALL libertarians", it isn't even compatible with the defining characteristic of libertarian ideology, the Non-Aggression Principle, which can be summarized briefly as the position that the use of non-defensive force is never legitimate. Anyone who holds this belief in
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Anyone who holds this belief in a "legitimate" role for government cannot, by definition, be a consistent libertarian by my definition.
FTFY.
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You know, I've never really understood why libertarians want to move society's functions from democratic control to unelected plutocrats. Do you think it'll end up as an utopia(-ish) or do you simply think you'd end up on top?
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Except for the ones that don't.
I suppose a defining feature of many is wanting no regulations on them but regulations on others - see Koch for an extreme example. He wanted the freedom to dump poison but the people downstream wouldn't get the freedom to have clean water. You could argue that he wasn't running as a "real" libertarian since he was really pushing for an oligarchy where those with the most money had the
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Re:Small Government? (Score:4, Insightful)
It sounds like what you're really saying is that in the absence of an FDA nobody would have ever known the blood tests were bogus.
But you bring up an interesting feature of a libertarian world: there can be no trust when it comes to anything that exceeds the expertise of the consumer. And there can be no trust of any new technology. Who's going to be the first to try radiation therapy for a tumor or a self-driving car?
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That's the sort of thing that happened before there was anything like the FDA.
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The FDA was created in 1906. I don't know what kind of blood tests they had back then, but my guess is that there were a LOT of bogus medical procedures and products before then.
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The market is not magical (Score:3)
Iraq is only now removing the placebo bomb detectors that were found to be worthless five years ago.
Anti-vaxxers are rife despite it being based on a fraud by an English doctor who wanted to sell the alternative vaccine that he had patented.
There's a long list of frauds that do not suddenly go away because of the "magic of the market".
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It's also worth pointing out that vaccines aren't much like a free market; lots of people are required to get them (for good reason) and there's basically no profit in them.
The claim you were replying to didn't say it would "suddenly" go away, just that it would *eventually*. What you're arguing about is whether a) government force makes fraud go away faster, and b) if it does, whether you can justify usin
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With the "small government" approach the scam would continue.
"Libertarians" take note.
Being free to scam others without consequence doesn't do a lot for the liberty of those being scammed.
It's always funny how people who argue against libertarianism don't have any fucking clue what libertarianism actually is. I'll explain, you try to understand.
One of the essential roles of government is contract enforcement. Along with property rights, contract enforcement is one of the bedrock principles that makes civilization civilized. I as an individual can make a contract with a multi-billion dollar company and if they renege on their end the government will enforce it (in theory, at least).
Therano
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Does the implied warranty of merchantability even apply to services? My understanding was that it applied to goods. (A blood test would be a service; a blood test kit would be a good).
Fitness might be arguable, though again, it seems only apply to goods. Maybe workmanlike quality--I am assuming that applies under US common law, but I am not sure how one would apply it to a medical service.
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Does the implied warranty of merchantability even apply to services? My understanding was that it applied to goods. (A blood test would be a service; a blood test kit would be a good).
Fitness might be arguable, though again, it seems only apply to goods. Maybe workmanlike quality--I am assuming that applies under US common law, but I am not sure how one would apply it to a medical service.
IANAL, but my understanding is that the law imposes upon a party who contracts to render a service for another an implied warranty to perform the service with that degree of skill, efficiency and knowledge that is possessed by those of ordinary skill, competency and standing in the particular trade or profession in which the performer is employed. However, there is always a question of liability (as opposed to simply refunding the monies originally paid to perform the service). In this case, it may take g
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There's a very wide array of people who call themselves libertarians, and you don't represent all of them.
You claim that the government will, in theory, enforce contracts between individuals and multinationals. One problem is that that's expensive and inefficient, and someone will have to pay for investigation and the court system. It's cheaper to have something like the FDA, imperfect as it is.
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I put it in quotes specifically because of the "but they are not a real libertarian" response of those who do.
Koch ran under that name but is very much an advocate of having a government too small to be able to effectively deal with contract enforcement.
My comment was really about telling people to beware of simplistic and dangerous stuff spouted by people like that
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They broke the implied warranty of merchantability.
When we start implying contracts, there's no limit to the government power. That's not libertarian. That's totalitarian, with nicer clothes.
What's hilarious is that cluefucks like yourself believe that this is a failure of libertarianism when, in fact, it's a failure of big government. We have a regulatory framework in place already that's supposed to find out that Theranos is a fraud before they sell the product, and yet they allowed the product to come to market.
Wouldn't an ineffective government (not an inconsistent one, like we have, but a hypothetical uniformly incompetent one) be the same as libertarian, only with higher costs? Having an oversight that doesn't provide oversight is the same as no oversight, which would be the libertarian solution. So how is this not a failure of libertarianism? Sure, it's also a fail of
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"Regular people didn't lose any money from this."
No, they just lost their health and dignity.
Those living in the US really need to watch this [imdb.com]. The guy's manner makes me cringe a bit, but his message and subject matter are both absolutely stunning.
Re:Small Government? (Score:4, Insightful)
People should remember that he makes polemics and not balanced documentaries. It doesn't make what he says any less true it just means he is pushing a single point of view very hard. Things that do not support his points of view will not be in his films but there are plenty of other places that support other points of view.
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81 tests had to be redone over a 6 months period, and it was at Theranos initiative after they found issues themselves in one of their labs (that does less than 10% of their tests). That's it. Nobody "lost their health or dignity" so you can stop crying wolf even if it feels comfortable to do it while there's a whole pack around you doing the same.
Everything else in this story is speculation, misinformation or small quotes from audit documents taken out of context.
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Go deep - if guilty, nail them and jail them! (Score:4, Insightful)
What went wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
"House Democrats Frank Pallone, Gene Green and Diana DeGette sent the letter on June 30th, asking Holmes to explain what went wrong,"
What went wrong is they got caught. That's what "went wrong".
This was all just a "magic snake oil" scheme designed to suck in wealthy, gullible investors, nothing more, nothing less.
Re:What went wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
What went wrong is they got caught. That's what "went wrong".
It is almost certainly more complicated than that. There is no way that a fraud like this could actually work in the long run, and any sensible investor would know that. What is more likely is that Elizabeth really thought her tech would work, hyped it to get capital, thus inflating expectations. Then she had too much pride to back down when the tech failed, so she started fudging a little, to buy time to fix the problems. But she couldn't fix the problems, so she then had a choice to either admit failure, and admit to the initial fudging, or ... dig deeper. Just like Bernie Madoff, she grabbed a shovel.
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There was never a question about Madoff going straight to scam. It wasn't until the pyramid scheme fell did he get caught.
This was just insanity and there was never an avenue for it succeed. There are no fudge lines in testing and anyone at any point could proven the product did not work. Which is what happened.
It never worked and either the people involved were criminal or criminally stupid.
I'm going to bet on a whole lot of sociopaths got together. It's still unlikely any of them will see jail time so loo
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I'm going to bet on a whole lot of sociopaths got together. It's still unlikely any of them will see jail time so looks like it panned out!
It did not "pan out". Theranos never IPOed, they were never acquired. There was no exit. There was no operating profit. Nearly everyone involved lost money.
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That is my take as well. Add youth and inexperience to the mix and possibly entirely misguided advice cheering her on and you have the makings of a disaster even with a good idea to start with. The thing is, a successful lab demonstration takes quite a while to turn into a valid product. 10 years is on the low side, 20 years is more realistic and some things take a lot longer. It takes experience to see that. That experience critically includes the experience of failure.
She gave off all the classic signs. (Score:5, Insightful)
But the icing on the cake is that after she had raised funds from non-pharma types she just kept promoting. I could barely crack a science publication or a science section in any publication with her single drop of blood hype.
Where I am from the government is huge on being able to "pick a winner" so about twice a year I see the same micro-bubble that is hype hype hype with some front man, usually some vaguely good story about rubber that will make tires good for 300,000km. Then a nice line-up of vaguely important local investors. And just before it all blows up they are in some local business publication with the title "Top 40 under 40' or some other bullshit.
Then it all goes to hell, there are recriminations about government money in the toilet, a useless audit, and then it is forgotten as the latest batch of sure thing winners follow down the same path.
While all this is amusing/enraging; the worst part is that she has now made it nearly impossible for any legitimate company to actually do this research. If some real bio-researcher comes up with some blood tests needing only one drop they won't get one investor to take their calls or conferences to let them talk. They might as well work on cold fusion or herbal cancer cures.
Re:She gave off all the classic signs. (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. Nobody is that brilliant. The really great ones either made their name using low-hanging fruits (nothing wrong with that, but there are none left these days) or took decades. It is also not about working an insane amount of time. Solid research shows that you can do about 6 hours of solid mental work a day and that is it. But you get these hours only if you do not work many more and take the weekends off. And nobody is exempt from that, even is some huge-ego morons claim they are.
The new thing here is that now women try to promote that faulty self-image as well (see. g.e. Marissa Mayer) and fail, just the same as the men that try it.
Re:She gave off all the classic signs. (Score:5, Insightful)
The second they find a higher rung, the earlier rung is discarded like chewed gum.
What pisses me off about these types is that even when the people they have wronged finally are able to expose them, they somehow land in more success. I have personally witnessed one case where the woman was pretty much thrown to the street in disgrace by a collective action of upper management and the entire board of directors, yet a few months later I read that she was appointed to be on the board of directors of a large monopoly and later was a board member on a number of other companies. All high paying board memberships with many juicy privileges. All that with not a single person who would have anything but nasty things to say about her. She even ripped off the person who bought her house. How the hell?
So in the case of this single drop of blood woman as well as Marissa Mayer, I predict a horribly long successful future where they go from organization to company turning them into complete crap and somehow being able to maintain a straight face while declaring success. Failures that will swell their bank accounts.
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I have met so many Marissa Mayers in my life and every one of them left a horrible taste in my mouth.
Well, next time I suggest merely eating with them rather than simpply eating them.
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I have met so many Marissa Mayers in my life and every one of them left a horrible taste in my mouth.
Well, next time I suggest merely eating with them rather than simpply eating them.
If someone actually ate the terrible people in this world, wouldn't we all be better off?
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But among the well groomed Type-A men the primary difference is usually sport. They usually do some sport that is in your face hardcore. It used to be marathons, then triathlons, and now it seems to be exotic variations of the above. "I've been invited to go to the ultra desert, high altitude marathon in Chile."
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"When they look at a person it is only to see if they are someone they can use. If not you can actually see the person vanish from their perception. But if the person is someone they can use as another run in their ladder climbing, their eyes light up and the wheels are turning."
Everyone does this to some extent, but the key difference between some sociopath executive and a healthy person is how two-way this is, and the level of sliminess involved.
People like it when they can gain something from others, it'
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Well, there is one clear reason why there are less female CEOs: There are less female sociopaths. That is not the only reason, of course.
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As for walking over some IT guy,...
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The new thing here is that now women try to promote that faulty self-image as well (see. g.e. Marissa Mayer) and fail, just the same as the men that try it.
And the problem is that because they're women, everyone wants to drink the Kool-aid, otherwise they're going to be labeled misogynistic. Many of the critics of Theranos' process fell victim to this: question the results, question the technique, and suddenly you're just a sexist who can't stand to see a woman succeed, so your questions don't matter. Everyone stuck their fingers in their ears and screamed "La la la, I can't hear you over the sound of this incredibly successful woman! Did I mention our CEO is
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If a strategy is successful, somebody is going to use it,. no matter how despicable (and yes, sexism is despicable and that it is here used to promote women over men does not make it one bit better).
At this point we can reliably say that women as CEOs are _not_ better than men, unless you want to run a scam, apparently.
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Well said. Same happens in New Zealand. There is a startup incubator in Auckland that goes on endlessly about picking winners. This allows them to suck up vast amounts of government money earmarked for startups to feed into its staff salaries and fancy offices. Rather annoying for people with actual startups who have to compete with their vast PR machine for any seed money.
Problem is, most genuine startup founders are busy trying to get a real product out to customers that works. In my experience in both st
What went wrong, Nothing went wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Failure what failure. Everything went according to typical psychopathic capitalism plans, privatise the profits and socialise the losses. Things only went wrong if the insiders lost money running the scam, if they generated millions in personal profits, then that is exactly the way, free market psychopathic capitalism is meant to work. As for health insurance companies who refuse to pay, or charter schools that abuse children or military contractors that foment war or security organisation spying for economic advantage for corrupt insiders, etc. etc. Everything is functioning exactly as designed, maximise short term profits, fuck everything else and dump the losses and problems on the idiots that vote the lessor evil, election after election, gumbys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] (they are laughing at you and make no mistake).
Re:What went wrong, Nothing went wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the thing... the CEO didn't cash out her chips before the value of her stock in the company hit zero. I'm sure she got a lovely salary, but she could have made out like a bandit if she'd sold earlier. Her mistake was thinking she could play magician forever w/ the slight of hand and sensationalism.
It's a shame corporations can't be thrown in jail for fraud like people... shame we can't at least put the CEO in jail for massive, obvious fraud -- at least to her shareholders if not to the public, too.
Re:What went wrong, Nothing went wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
The other possibility is that she also was played. You see this regularly in the property developer market - banks need someone charismatic to lend money too (which creates profit for them), but who is stupid/egoist enough to not wonder why this friendly bank guy is giving them all this money. The banks charm them into securing whatever earthly possessions they and their grandma have against these loans, and ensure the bank is first tier lender. While things are booming this money feeding machine makes the banks huge profits. When the bubble pops, the banks quickly liquidate the guy, recover their part of the loans, and leave the second tier lenders and bankrupted developer to wear the losses.
If she didn't setup a private trust and move a few million into it when she was a billionaire, then she really does seem like the sort of gullible charismatic puppet bubble investors look for.
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Zero net worth? (Score:2)
I doubt this. Perhaps when compared to the billions that she was worth before her net worth is close to zero.
Unless she is a complete dunce, she will have paid herself millions from the money that investors put into the company. She should have a few millions left over. Hardly billionaire status, but not too shabby either. She will probably get a nice position at a VC company, making millions on the basis of here "experience".
Gotta hand it to Congress (Score:2)
They really know how to beat a dead horse - especially in an election year.
Maybe one of the congress-critters will ask Holmes why she has a man's voice.
Ah Yes (Score:2)
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If we start holding CEOs accountable, the terrorists have already won.
Uncovered Ponzi-Scheme gets big investigation. (Score:2)
News at 11.
Honestly, where's the big deal?
Can they jail her? Will they? That's what I'm interested in.
Distraction by the Jobs Distortion Field? (Score:2)
I already see a ton of misogynistic posts about Elizabeth Holmes, and I'm not going there. What I am going to mention is that she had that Steve Jobs personality that makes people stop thinking rationally. She even wears black turtlenecks. Startups need charismatic founders because how else would they raise money? But there's something about that Type-A Jobsian executive mystique that just appeals to people on some level. It's entirely possible she had very little idea of how things were actually going also
Well first we'd need a reasonable prosecutor... (Score:2)
seems like we're a bit short of those these days.
I don't get it, am I missing something? (Score:2)
I must be miss something please clarify: My understanding is Theranos product/services are not as good as marketed, not fully vetted, accusations of using the older tech to do much of the testing, and some mistakes found in the lab work. Further, not disclosing secret sauce information and not being very forthcoming with outside requests.
So far, that just sounds like a normal company, so whats the fraud, crimes, etc?
They also lost a lot of business with companies backing out from all the bad press, feeding
What if they do have the tech? (Score:2)
Does anyone ever doubt when companies like this go from darlings to nothing overnight that it couldn't have been a trick to dump the stock price?
Not saying it happened but.... business people have done far worse for less.
Relatively easy to drive a company into the ground only to rebuild it from the ashes. Trump himself uses the technique.
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I agree that Political Grandstanding is bullshit. Especially your Sexist grandstanding.
Lets keep this within the context of a legal investigation and keep your sexist hogwash in the toilet where it belongs.
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Quit falling for the smear campaign, it's unsightly.
Whether or not Theranos is guilty of the claims is irrelevant. You're deciding she's guilty before they've even presented any real evidence based solely on hearsay. Not that you should trust the evidence presented in court.
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Whose money did they take, and what didn't work?
You talk as if we were in a post-Enron analysis situation, but that's not the case at all. First they're still in business, still making money doing regular tests at a lower price than the competition (which I start to believe is the root cause of this whole charade). They're still doing research and perfecting their process and technologies, with the goal not to detect cancer from a drop of blood, but to lower even more the cost of blood tests.
As for investor
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Literally the whole thing is about they claimed they had a novel blood test and they falsified records that the tests worked when they didn't. Are you not familiar at even a basic level what the problem is and why they're in trouble?
You obviously don't even understand the biased version reported by the media, so let's just write you off as someone who will never know what this story is until Oliver Stone makes a movie about it
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Thank you. Although I actively play the Devil's advocate I have my doubts about the Theranos story (read my earlier comments before this bullshit media storm and you'll see I have no love for Mrs Holmes), but when imbeciles start calling someone a Holocaust denier for disagreeing with them about such a globally unsiginificant matter as the Theranos scandal, that's a sign that the "truth" they defend is shallow and stands only on the weak shoulders of a misinformed lynch mob. There's talk, there's heated dis
Re: I remembe seeing her on TV (Score:2, Funny)
You feel terrible for a fraudster. I have a great investment opportunity for you.
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You feel terrible for a fraudster.
That's not fraud. It's simply millenial over-self-confidence making its inevitable acquaintance with reality.
They almost certainly believed in their idea originally. The point at which it became fraud is the point at which they started using other people's machines with diluted blood against the specification. She wasn't a "fraudster" to begin with but it really looks, from the media reports, like she has become one.
It's a hard lesson for life, but there's a point where what looks grey and just "enhancing your business opportunities" suddenly turns out to be completely black and clearly fraud. You have already
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-- over-self-confident millennial
-- fraudster
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Exactly. If she had raised money, failed, and not tried to sell the product anyway then its just failure. Feeling sorry for her is reasonable.
But she raised money, failed, hid her failure, and then pretended it was working while giving inaccurate test results. That's fraud.
Re:I remembe seeing her on TV (Score:5, Funny)
that the company claimed could detect hundreds of diseases using a single drop of blood.
bleeding edge bio-tech
Too bad it turned out to be bleeding edge marketing, and now people are out for blood.
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If it sounds too good to be true, it it almost always is. Nobody at that age has that kind of skills. It takes high potential, will and decades of experience to get to a point where you can make even significantly smaller breakthroughs than claimed here these days. My guess is that the youth-madness that pervades society has made too many people utterly blind to the realities.
Now, I do not actually think she is a fraudster. If she was one, she would have sold the company at the first good offer (and there m
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She may not have started out as a fraudster, but when she started claiming to diagnose diseases that she couldn't she became one.
What you say is generally, but not always, true. It's also generally true that products with a portion that is extremely secret usually involve fraud, but it's not always true.
The approach she claimed is plausible. I can conceive of doing that with a printed chip using nano-scale bioreators. I couldn't do it, but it's not really unreasonable to claim that someone else could. A
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I am with you.
I have had experiences in my life where I let people down. It is not fun. I can only imagine that this is 10000 times anything I ever had to face.
Hopefully they can either salvage something of the testing technology or refund investors money.
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Meaning, of course, that she stayed this side of criminal prosecution, and not anything more favorable?