I'm not an expert. I'm a former bench-level chemist who became a lawyer, has spent years in pharmaceutical document review, and is now working on a master's in regulatory affairs. I still figured out that Theranos was a complete con before I finished the first article I read on the company. It's just not possible to do a complete blood panel instantaneously with the few drops of blood you get from a finger prick. There's not enough blood to test accurately. Back when I was in the lab (we did pesticide testing for FIRFA re-registration), we knew that as we isolated the minor metabolites, there was always a chance that our samples would be too small and too dilute for us to get an accurate read on how much material we had.
What I didn't know was how *much* of a con it was, and just how reprehensible CEO Elizabeth Holmes and her second in command/secret romantic partner Sunny Balwani were. Holmes is a brilliant psychopath whose goal from childhood was to be a billionaire. She convinced a Stanford engineering professor of her brilliance before dropping out and leveraged his cachet with venture capitalists into one of the hottest start-ups in Silicon Valley. I can almost understand how these intelligent but scientifically naive executives fell for Holmes's pitch. Sure, it's impossible, but Holmes was selling the dream. In our pockets we carry more computer power than put man on the moon (and use it too look at cat videos), and if I so wish I can watch a movie during my commute - that was a fantasy as late as 2000. So, maybe this magic machine could...no, I still can't see how anyone with even a high school knowledge of science could fall for it.
But they did, and they did in part because Elizabeth Holmes was such a fantastic salesman. She put on a show, imitating Steve Jobs's black turtlenecks, using her Hitchcock blonde looks, and when asked for actual demos, simply cheating. Her first victims were also mercenaries, so while I found her actions repellant, I looked at them clinically. Venture capitalists are just in it for the money, the CEO of Wallgreens was trying to one-up CVS, and James Mattis pulled rank on the FDA savvy Lieutenant Colonel who saw that the machine didn't, couldn't work. Sunny Balwani (a man who'd lucked into a dot-com payoff despite not realizing that potassium is K, not P, in the periodic table) made the Theranos workplace incredibly toxic, but people either moved on or coped. The constant turnover didn't hurt Theranos's public impression, and George Schultz, Sam Nun, and Henry Kissinger joint the Board of Directors.
Then Theranos, and Holmes, started harassing members of the Fuisz family. They're not sympathetic people, but the Fuiszes and Holmes parents had once been close and Richard Fuisz helped get her started. It just didn't seem fair to slap them with a frivolous patent infringement suit. This suit, however, started the company's downfall. The Fuisz attorneys found a potential whistleblower in Ian Gibbons. A tragic event prevented his testimony, but it eventually led to another whistleblower tipping John Carreyrou of the Wall Street Journal. I'd been moderately interested in Bad Blood to this point, but Carreyrou's investigation (complete with stalking and threats aimed at him and the whistleblowers, including Shultz's grandson Tyler) completely engrossed me. Theranos feel apart, probably a decade later than it should have, and Elizabeth Holmes's fortune disappeared. In a final attempt to save her company, she cried sexism - but as someone half a generation older who was literally held back in math in junior high because I was a girl, it doesn't sit well with me to see her do that. She used her classic beauty and the desire for Silicon Valley to improve optics with a female billionaire to con others.
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