Earlier this week, I attended a screening of You Can See Everything, the buzzy new documentary about the disgraced former biotech CEO Elizabeth Holmes. I went in not really knowing what to expect. I’d avoided spoilers (and won’t be giving anything away here, either!).
I was wondering what new information this film could reveal, given how familiar many of us are with the Theranos story thanks to years of media coverage, the best-selling book Bad Blood, and the Hulu series The Dropout, starring Amanda Seyfried. Like many others who have seen the film, I came away feeling unsettled. But not just about Holmes’s fraud and the somewhat disturbing interactions between the subjects.
The film reignited a concern I’ve had about covering science for most of my career: Despite our best efforts, we never can actually see everything. In case you’re rusty on the details, Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford University in 2003 to run Theranos, a diagnostics company she founded, when she was just 19. She went on to claim that her company had invented a way to run over 100 diagnostic tests on just a few drops of blood.
Holmes raised hundreds of millions of dollars for Theranos, which was valued at $9 billion in 2014. Forbes named her the youngest self-made female billionaire—she was worth $4.5 billion when she was just 30 years old. Things started to unravel in 2015, when an investigation by the Wall Street Journal raised concerns by former Theranos employees that the tests didn’t work.
Some also said that the company’s device had not been tested properly, and that blood samples had been analyzed on machines from other companies instead. MIT Technology Review named it one of the biggest technology failures of 2015. Forbes had revised Holmes’s worth to $0 by 2016.
That year, a damning government report said that the company’s lab was struggling with basic procedures and gave patients results even when they knew they could be wrong. In 2018, Theranos, Holmes, and former company president Ramesh Balwani were charged with “massive fraud.” In 2022, she was sentenced to a little over 11 years in prison for defrauding investors. She began serving her sentence in May 2023.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
