Many of the people who showed up at clinics actually had their blood drawn from old-fashioned needles.

The premise was scientifically dubious, and Theranos’s technology was either not ready, unworkable or able to perform only a fraction of the tests promised. Her beguiling concept was that by a simple pinprick - drawing only a drop or two of blood - Theranos could dispense with the hypodermic needle, which she likened to a gruesome medieval torture, and perform a full range of blood tests in walk-in clinics and, ultimately, people’s homes. She cast a hypnotic spell on even seasoned investors, honing an irresistible pitch about a little girl who was afraid of needles and who now wanted to improve the world by providing faster, better blood tests. The first is a chilling, third-person narrative of how Holmes came up with a fantastic idea that made her, for a while, the most successful woman entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. This is the story the prizewinning Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou tells virtually to perfection in “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup,” which really amounts to two books. It wowed an associate dean at Stanford it persuaded Safeway and Walgreens to spend millions of dollars to set up clinics to showcase Theranos’s vaunted revolutionary technology.Īnd its founder, Elizabeth Holmes, was feted as a biomedical version of Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, a wunderkind college dropout who would make blood testing as convenient as the iPhone. The company was the subject of adoring media profiles it attracted a who’s who of retired politicos to its board, among them George Shultz and Henry Kissinger. In Theranos’s brief, Icarus-like existence as a Silicon Valley darling, marquee investors including Robert Kraft, Betsy DeVos and Carlos Slim shelled out $900 million. The devices Biden saw weren’t close to being workable they had been staged for the visit.īiden was not the only one conned. Biden saw rows of impressive-looking equipment - the company’s supposedly game-changing device for testing blood - and offered glowing praise for “the laboratory of the future.” In 2015, Vice President Joe Biden visited the Newark, Calif., laboratory of a hot new start-up making medical devices: Theranos.

BAD BLOOD Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup By John Carreyrou 352 pp.

Silicon valley bad blood