Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of the fraud-plagued blood testing company Theranos, made her national press debut in the Wall Street Journal in 2013. The article – “A Drop of Blood, an Instant Diagnosis” – was not a scientific article, or even a business article. It was published in the Opinion section by a writer on the Journal’s editorial board, Joseph Rago, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his critiques of the Affordable Care Act.
He wrote that he was impressed by the prospect of individuals having more direct control over their health care; No less an eminence than former Secretary of State George Shultz, a member of the board of directors of Theranos, told Rago that Holmes was the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.
In 2014, Holmes was the youngest female billionaire ever, and the mid-2010s were electric with the success stories of the tech industry: the iPhone, Tesla, Airbnb, Twitter. I was an editor at WIRED at the time, and Theranos, as presented, seemed very WIRED to me. This seemed to prove that a Silicon Valley approach to innovation would work across all industries, including medicine. And in the magazine that first published the idea of the “quantified self,” Theranos’ speech validated the idea that individuals could take charge of their own health through innovative technology and access to data.
A colleague of mine, an editor named Caitlin Roper, saw a story in Theranos and in Holmes, but no one knew exactly what form it should take. The editor suggested that Roper go talk to Holmes and see what was going on. The result was a long, influential Q&A titled “One Drop, Infinite Data: How Elizabeth Holmes Built a Better Blood Test.” Because print magazines move with the agility and speed of a post-Panamax cargo ship, the story only ran in the March 2014 issue.
Over the next few months, other publications followed. Fortune put Holmes on the cover. The New Yorker did a profile. In October 2015, Inc. put her on its cover, calling her “the next Steve Jobs” – and a few weeks later, the Wall Street Journal published another article about Theranos, written by journalist John Carreyrou. The headline was deceptively humble: “Theranos struggles with blood tests.”
Uh-oh.
Fast, accurate blood tests were wrong, innovative technology didn’t exist, and Walgreens, a major partner, ended its deal with Theranos. It was a scam. A new documentary film, released this week, follows Holmes in the weeks leading up to his incarceration.
Gn bussni
