Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

Soldato
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She's already received tons of acclaim and been hoisted as a role model for people, a "self-made billionaire" success story.

Wallgreens own 50%+ of Boots, so, Brexit et al. her products could have ended up closer than we would have liked,
monopolies office should be investigating the very few selected LFT test providers UK authorised -they say other countries just trust mftr
Equally brazen as UK bomb detector company.

broadcast about total absence of female Bond villains the other day, could be a good model.
 
Associate
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The idea itself is amicable and perhaps worth aiming for. The problem is that we are decades if not hundreds of years short of the kind of thing she wanted to do. The technology is just not there.
Faster than light travel seems like a good idea of something that could materialise in future too. Maybe I'll go and build a prototype warp core using a large translucent plastic tube and some L.E.D.s.
 

NVP

NVP

Soldato
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Not correct.

The inaccuracies occurred due to the minimal blood samples being diluted to increase quantities for testing.
 
Soldato
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Not correct.

The inaccuracies occurred due to the minimal blood samples being diluted to increase quantities for testing.

My understanding (please correct if wrong) was their test allows, from a minimal sample, a full spectrum of tests. Ie being more efficient in the process.
I’m unsure if there was any additional tests for new illnesses etc.
 

NVP

NVP

Soldato
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That was their aim, whether they got a working product I do not know. I do know they were diluting the sample in order to get quantities large enough to perform lab tests on, unfortunately the dilution makes the tests wildly inaccurate.
 
Soldato
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My understanding (please correct if wrong) was their test allows, from a minimal sample, a full spectrum of tests. Ie being more efficient in the process.
I’m unsure if there was any additional tests for new illnesses etc.
They were diluting so they could use readily available commercial machines to do the tests, presumably until their own device was ready. But it would never have been ready.
 
Caporegime
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So these billionaires, who invested in the product, never saw it working?

She would do "demonstrations" with the machine where she'd invite a load of investors round, take some blood samples and then "let's go for a tour of our facility" which would allow her to use actual machines from the likes of Siemens to run tests in a hidden lab.

Her creativity was amazing, I'll give her that.
 
Caporegime
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The goal was to assume they could miniaturize and consolidate existing testing machines, as the progression of technology often does. Of course sll the existing machines sre state of the art with billions in R&D from numerous mega corps and big pharma, so there was no possibility of any quick technological progress
 
Soldato
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So these billionaires, who invested in the product, never saw it working?

Correct, which is why the investors were largely people who had no idea how to do due diligence and got caught up in the hype and cult of personality she created, and were mostly just wealthy rather than self made. She also massively over exaggerated her links to established trusted names, like having Pfizer branded on all her headed paper.
 
Man of Honour
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So these billionaires, who invested in the product, never saw it working?

Being very rich doesn't make a person immune to a well executed con and Theranos was a very well executed con. Victor Lustig(*) would have been impressed by her.




* A con artist best known for having sold the Eiffel Tower (twice), having conned various rich people into bidding against each other for it. But he also pulled some "advances in technology" cons, such as selling "newly developed" printing technology that produced very high quality printing from a machine far smaller than the printers capable of that quality of printing at that time. He made that sound very plausible. Technology was progressing rapidly at the time. A suitcase-sized printer capable of the print quality of the previous generation of room-sized printers wasn't obviously impossible, especially as his "printer" was very slow. But it printed perfect bank notes, indistinguishable from real ones. Even better, this new printing technology was such a secret that police agencies tackling fake bank notes weren't yet aware it existed so they couldn't be looking for it. He'd use it himself, but it was very slow and he needed money now. So he'd sell it to you. For a lot of money, but it was literally a money printer. If you weren't in as much of a hurry for money as he was, what could go wrong? He demonstrate it for you. You could see the perfect fake note coming out of the printer. Very slowly, but it was a perfect fake. Feel free to examine it yourself. Nothing to hide here. You've got the proof that it works in your hand! Do we have a deal? Thank you and goodbye. By the time you got suspicious, disassembled the "printer" and found only a system of gears and rollers that slowly fed out the few real notes he'd put inside it, he was long gone.
 
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