Theranos: Fraud as Entertainment
Since 2014, I have been following the rise and fall of Theranos, the fake-fraud-criminal-hoax blood testing company that scammed some of the dumbest money out of hundreds of millions of dollars before it was all exposed for the sham that it was by great journalism.
For those unfamiliar, Theranos was a start-up company founded by Elizabeth Holmes, a college dropout who had a great idea but no actual ability to make it a reality because, among other things, her idea defied the basic laws of physics, chemistry, biochemistry and common sense.
Holmes told investors that she was going to transform the blood testing industry by making a device that could test our blood for hundreds of conditions using a single fingertip prick, instead of the needle-in-the-arm blood draws that take a lot more blood and are a lot more painful.
To make a long story short, there’s a reason why they still take blood samples using the needle-in-the-arm method: because that’s the only one that works, for lots of complex reasons.
Anyway, Holmes sold a bunch of investors on the idea that despite just a semester and a half at college, she could do it better, faster, cheaper, with less pain.
Except, not so much. She was convicted on four counts of criminal fraud at a federal trial that concluded earlier this year.
When the Theranos story was in the news, it was an important story. On the way up, credible media outlets like Fortune magazine, The New Yorker, CNBC and countless others were reporting about this startup that was quite literally going to change the medical testing world for the better.
Then, the fall back to Earth was kicked off in the fall of 2015 when a brilliant investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal, John Carreyrou, latched onto the story and proceeded to methodically debunk it with truth, facts, sources and intrepid reporting.
So, I then followed the Theranos story on the way down, right through all of Carreyrou’s reports in the Wall Street Journal, and his subsequent gripping best seller, through the trial and the verdict early in 2022. During this entire time, it was a legitimate, important news story.
Now, the whole sordid, twisted Theranos affair is getting the Hollywood treatment. The first dramatization to come out is a Hulu series called “The Dropout.” The first three episodes have been released and I have watched them. With mixed feelings.
As a news story, it needed to be told. Peoples’ lives were at stake because the Theranos technology was deployed to select Walgreens locations in advance of a national (and, presumably, international) rollout. So, the blood tests that didn’t work were going to be used by millions, who likely would not have received accurate information about their condition and subsequent treatment recommendations by their doctors.
But is this the stuff of Hollywood “entertainment?”
Maybe. The entertainment industrial complex has depicted many horrific and tragic actual events, from wars, to the Holocaust to pandemics and presented them as “entertainment.”
So, on the scale of human tragedy, Theranos ranks pretty low since it appears that Carreyrou’s news reporting helped shut down the company before it could do real, widespread damage to patients around the world.
My ambivalence comes from my feeling that Elizabeth Holmes should be a footnote in history. She is a convicted felon, who may do prison time (the sentencing is not until late September 2022) and who contributed ZERO to the worlds of science, medicine or business. Hers was a middle school idea that might have been a good candidate to win second prize at the local science fair.
Instead of forgetting her (but still learning from her crimes), Hollywood creates an eight-part miniseries that dramatizes her rise and fall, and I watch it.
I feel like I shouldn’t give her the time of day, let alone my viewing time, but I am three episodes in and will no doubt watch the rest when they come out over the next couple of months.
I’ll take comfort that the original news reporting that exposed the fraud, and the subsequent book, all nonfiction, are much more gripping than this Hulu dramatization. Holmes, as played by Amanda Seyfried, comes off as a joyless, driven sociopath, who deserves all the prison time that the federal judge can find in his heart to give her.
So, if you haven’t followed the story and you are now interested, my advice is skip the Hulu series and buy the book. Because, in this case of greed and criminal fraud, the unvarnished truth is much more interesting. And important.