Reply to The Dropout on Hulu (Elizabeth Holmes story)

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OK but did Elizabeth have a scientific concept to support the ability to do this?

Anything more than- wouldn't it be cool if it was one drop of a blood into a machine that super analyzed it immediately?

If Siemens could shrink and speed up their machines, they would have. What was the breakthough she was bringing to the table?

I feel like my 9 year old could come up with the concept. I realize I'm being snarky here but really I'm totally ignorant about all of this I just don't get it.[/quote]

I had the same thought about this being elizabeth’s “invention” in the same way 9 year olds “invent” magnetic levitating shoes or whatever. [/quote]

Even though I'm horrified by what she did, I don't agree. Sometimes inventions really do start by someone saying, in an almost childlike way, "what if there was a better way to do this?" Like the telephone or the internet also probably sound like the fantasies of a 9 year old at some time.

My issue with her is that once she had the idea, she talked to experts who told her it wasn't possible, and she very arrogantly didn't listen. If your 9 year old came up with this idea you might even think "hey, yeah, that would be great -- having your blood drawn is awful." But if you decided to pursue it, you'd talk to people who understand blood testing and if every single one of them told you "sounds great, people have tried, it's just very difficult/impossible to run most of these common blood tests on less than a certain amount of blood" would you then pitch it to venture capital and falsify a prototype result in order to start a multi-billion dollar company? No.

It's not the "having an idea" part that is upsetting. It's all the other stuff. Lots of people have good ideas they can't get off the ground. That's... most ideas.[/quote]

I agree with you, but I think the Walgreens exec (who will always be Cameron from Ferris Bueller to me) represented this counterpoint nicely and why she was able to go so far with this. You have to go back 10 years, to when unicorns were getting launched and people were desperate to find another one and make money. He described it as, people in our generation are old and behind - kids today aren't limited by "the way it's always been done" and they have this vision etc....I think people really, really wanted to tech to work because if we can revolutionize so much of our lives the way the internet, social media, etc. has why can't we revolutionize how we draw blood? It seems like it could work with billions in investment and smart people right?

And I do think Walgreens understood they weren't going to be able to test for 100s of things. It seems like at the first roll out they were only offering a few tests, and they accepted that it couldn't be done in house etc. But they still felt like they were innovators and bringing this to the forefront. So it seemed like they settled and let it go further. But in doing that gave it a bunch of credibility and probably helped perpetuate if for a few more years.

I think in some ways we've seen the same thing with wearables. I work in health care and people were just convinced for years that if people had a watch or something that tracked things it would be a game changer. And it's really not turned out that way. Mostly it's healthy, wealthy people working to reduce their marathon time or something. But there is a ton of things in health tech that is the next big thing. The danger here is that they were taking people's BLOOD and giving them medical information, which is really horrifying.
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