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John Carreyrou’s final chapter on Theranos

John Carreyrou talks with Nilay Patel about his six-year journey covering the ongoing Theranos scandal, from an early tip from a pathologist to his new podcast Bad Blood: The Final Chapter.

Photo Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge

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JOHN CARREYROU’S FINAL CHAPTER ON THERANOS

Covering the blood testing startup in print and audio

By Nilay [email protected] Sep 28, 2021, 9:00am EDT

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you’re a Decoder listener, it’s a pretty sure bet that you’ve heard of Theranos and its charismatic, troubled founder Elizabeth Holmes. Holmes convinced a long list of major investors and companies to give her huge amounts of money, all on the back of her claims that the Theranos technology could do hundreds of blood tests with just a tiny sample of blood — a pinprick.

The Theranos testing machine — called the Edison — wasn’t accurate, even though it was deployed in Walgreens locations around the country. All the while, Holmes was appearing on covers of magazines, signing more deals, and attracting greater and greater fame. Until everything changed. Right now, Holmes is on trial in a criminal lawsuit brought by the federal government. Her former partner, Sunny Balwani, will face his own trial for similar charges.

Today, I’m talking to the reporter who first exposed Holmes and Theranos, and started it all. John Carreyrou was working at The Wall Street Journal in 2015 when he started publishing articles about how Theranos was misleading customers, partners, and investors. Theranos aggressively tried to stop John’s reporting in 2015 and Holmes even tried to get Journal owner Rupert Murdoch, who was an investor in Theranos, to stop the story. He declined, and the stories have become a cautionary tale: you can’t just believe the hype.

I wanted to talk to John about the case and what it has been like to cover the story for six years. He is as close to this story as any reporter can be. He’s even on the witness list — and he was put there by Elizabeth Holmes’ legal team. And because this is Decoder, we talked about what it’s like to be a podcast creator — John is covering Holmes’ trial on a new podcast called Bad Blood: The Final Chapter — how that business is going, and why he decided to put some of his episodes behind the Apple Podcasts subscription system. And I asked for the numbers, of course.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

John Carreyrou, you were an investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal. You broke the Theranos story. You’re the author of Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, a book about Theranos. And now you are the host of the podcast Bad Blood: The Final Chapter, which is coming out alongside the trial of Elizabeth Holmes, the CEO and founder of Theranos. Welcome to Decoder.

Thanks for having me, happy to be here.

I’m very excited to talk to you. I feel like, I followed your reporting, I read the book, listening to the podcast, all excellent work. And I think, a kind of a watershed moment in tech reporting and how the Valley perceives itself in relationship to the media. So I want to talk about all that, but let’s start with the very beginning. I think a lot of listeners to the show are familiar with the Theranos story, they’re familiar with what happened, but give us kind of the basics. In 2015, you put out a story saying the Theranos fingerprick test just didn’t work. How did you come to that story?

I had not heard of Elizabeth Holmes until I read a profile of her in the New Yorker in mid-December 2014. At that point, she’d been raising her profile for about a year and a half in Silicon Valley and had become pretty well known. There had been the iconic cover story of her in Fortune magazine, about six months prior. So she was becoming a celebrity, but this New Yorker story was the first time I’d ever heard of her. I read the story with interest, commuting back from the Journal’s offices in midtown Manhattan to where I lived in Brooklyn. As interesting as I found it, I also was immediately suspicious because this whole conceit at the heart of the story was that she was a college dropout who was revolutionizing this very technical corner of medicine, namely blood diagnostics. That didn’t seem right to me.

At that point I had been covering medicine for over 10 years, doing a lot of investigative reporting about health care and medicine, and I knew that science is hard and that it takes a long time. And it’s not like computer coding where people like Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates before him, learn how to code when they were in high school, in their parents’ basement. Medicine is not like that, you don’t teach yourself medicine in your parents’ basement. And so I was suspicious about that, but to be fair, when I got off the subway and I got home, I put the story out of my mind and kind of forgot about it.

And it was a few weeks later that I got a tip from a pathologist in the Midwest, who had read the very same New Yorker story. And he had been even more suspicious than me because he knew a lot about blood testing. He didn’t believe this idea that she had created this great invention that could do all these tests off a finger stick of blood. And he and I had had dealings before. So he called me up with a tip and I started digging from there. That was the inception of the whole thing.

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Source : www.theverge.com

Hot Startup Theranos Has Struggled With Its Blood

Silicon Valley lab, led by Elizabeth Holmes, is valued at $9 billion but isn’t using its technology for all the tests it offers

Hot Startup Theranos Has Struggled With Its Blood-Test Technology

Hot Startup Theranos Has Struggled With Its Blood-Test Technology Silicon Valley lab, led by Elizabeth Holmes, is valued at $9 billion but isn’t using its technology for all the tests it offers

Theranos CEO: Company Did Not Rush to Market

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Theranos CEO: Company Did Not Rush to MarketPlay video: Theranos CEO: Company Did Not Rush to Market

Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes disagrees with the assertion that her company was too quick to market its products. She speaks with WSJ’s Jonathan Krim at the WSJDLive 2015 conference in Laguna Beach, Calif.(Originally Published October 21, 2015)

By John Carreyrou

Updated Oct. 16, 2015 12:01 am ET

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On Theranos Inc.’s website, company founder Elizabeth Holmes holds up a tiny vial to show how the startup’s “breakthrough advancements have made it possible to quickly process the full range of laboratory tests from a few drops of blood.”

The company offers more than 240 tests, ranging from cholesterol to cancer. It claims its technology can work with just a finger prick. Investors have poured more than $400 million into Theranos, valuing it at $9 billion and her majority stake at more than half that. The 31-year-old Ms. Holmes’s bold talk and black turtlenecks draw comparisons to Apple Inc. cofounder Steve Jobs.

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Theranos founder who promised to revolutionise diagnostic testing is convicted of fraud

Elizabeth Holmes, the Silicon Valley inventor and entrepreneur who aimed to “democratise healthcare” with a machine read fingerprick test that would render current blood test technology obsolete, has been found guilty on four counts of fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud by a jury in a California federal court. Investors in Holmes’ company Theranos lost hundreds of millions of dollars when its testing technology was proven to be useless or unreliable in almost all applications. All but 12 of more than 240 available tests processed at the company’s headquarters were actually put through standard commercial diagnostic equipment which the company had secretly bought, because its proprietary “Edison” machines did not give accurate results. As a result, patients …

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Theranos founder who promised to revolutionise diagnostic testing is convicted of fraud

BMJ 2022; 376 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.o11 (Published 05 January 2022)

Cite this as: BMJ 2022;376:o11

Opinion

Theranos’ dystopian vision lives on

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Elizabeth Holmes and Harvard Medical School Board of Fellows—a cautionary tale

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Investors in Holmes’ company Theranos lost hundreds of millions of dollars when its testing technology was proven to be useless or unreliable in almost all applications. All but 12 of more than 240 available tests processed at the company’s headquarters were actually put through standard commercial diagnostic equipment which the company had secretly bought, because its proprietary “Edison” machines did not give accurate results.

As a result, patients …

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hot startup theranos has struggled with its blood-test technology

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John Carreyrou’s final chapter on Theranos

JOHN CARREYROU’S FINAL CHAPTER ON THERANOS

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Hot Startup Theranos Has Struggled With Its Blood

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