It is terribly easy for us to want to seek out super heroes in this day and age. There are so few of them, you see. Most of us are willing to jump on any bandwagon that comes along; celebrity, athletes, entrepreneurs and even politicians are put on pedestals before any due diligence has been positioned in place. This is the case of the unethical diagnosis of Elizabeth Holmes.
By all appearances, Elizabeth Holmes, President Obama’s 32-year old Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship was one of those people who caused inspiration, aspiration and celebration.
Elizabeth Holmes was the founder of a company called Theranos, a medical diagnostic play funded and fueled by Silicon Valley dollars. Some referred to her as the “Billion Dollar Baby,” and indeed on paper her wealth and rise to power was astronomical. Politicians swooned at her feet, the Theranos Board was a veritable “Who’s Who,” and she became the darling of Wall Street.
As of this date, her net worth is about “zero.” Hopefully, she has enough in funds to buy her groceries and gas for her car.
What Happened?
The company arrogantly told the Wall Street community that their Edison blood-testing machinery could effectively conduct hundreds of tests from just a couple drops of blood. Before going any further, I suppose I should apologize to Thomas Edison who was both ethical and invented devices that actually worked.
The Theranos Edison machinery was woefully inadequate. In fact, the company has just informed the federal government that more than two years’ worth of medical tests (2014 and 2015) the company conducted were in error. The technology did not work. Reports are that after 2015, they completely lost faith in their own equipment.
The insane valuation of the company to the tune of $9 billion, driven by the hero-hungry media and Wall Street investor relations hype artists, was done so without one rationally thinking voice asking if the company had performed and conducted basic, scientific due-diligence.
Making the problem even worse (please note this well), Theranos equipment while supposedly having the ability to test blood for 200 parameters, could only test for 12. Even during the best of times, they had to outsource nearly 95% of the blood tests to independent laboratories!
Hundreds of thousands of lives each year were placed in the hands of these fraudsters and I pray no lives were lost as a result of this scam. However, should we surprised by this company’s shenanigans any more than we should be surprised by Volkswagen falsifying fuel efficiency or a peanut butter company disregarding the fact that its peanut butter contained salmonella?
At the core of Theranos, after the veneers of valuation, glitz and glamour were removed, after the celebrity-like positioning of Ms. Holmes, there was a shocking lack of ethics bordering on the criminal. Thousands of investors were taken in because they, like Wall Street and rationally-thinking scientific minds, did not make the effort to determine if the technology and its claims were viable.
Please forgive me because I know my comments may be slightly offensive in certain quarters but were some investors taken in by Elizabeth Holmes’ beauty, youth and self-assurance? Did we want to believe everything this Silicon Valley “product” stood for just because we wanted to be around the fantasy of her success? Ethically, if all of the accusations come to light, this “product” may turn into an ugly and disgusting scenario of greed. Elizabeth Holmes could very well be no different than Bernie Madoff or Jeffrey Skilling.
Ethical Tests
As a society, we sadly disregard ethics for celebrity. There are hundreds of thousands of ethical young women and men. They work hard, dream big and promise to do their best. However, they are often not fancy, or boastful or have the temerity to make outrageous claims. What separates these fine people from Theranos, is ethics.
My solution, especially for companies going public, is to insist on ethical training and ethical screening of the technology and/or mission. Why ethical “tests” are never brought into the conversation is mystifying to me.
When celebrity comes up against ethics, the result can be unpleasant. In the years Theranos was in operation, more than 890,000 annual blood tests were supposedly conducted by its technology. The ethical responsibility was enormous. No one in power seemed to have cared, least of all Ms. Holmes. She was, after all, young and healthy albeit, highly unethical.
The company had the opportunity to commit fraud and they ran with it.
YOUR COMMENTS ARE WELCOME!
I highly agree with your assessment. i think that this age of celebrity is appalling. There seems to be no need/desire for fact checking or legitimate scientific references (such as business or scientific literature). I have two science degrees and an MBA and I cannot find a job. I consider myself to have high ethical standards and I look around at popular culture and I can’t believe what I see. To me it has no value and yet others crave and seek notoriety at all costs. What is worse is that they can’t or won’t look through the outward charisma of a celebrity/politician/billionaire/sport star to see that there is really no ethical character there, it’s all about the money and when the money is gone, what do these poor (poor in spirit) people really have.
I highly agree, It is incredibly what people will do for “greed” regardless of the consequences to others.
Or, you all could have fallen for the fact that she was a female. Don’t worry about medical facts, she’s a FEMALE, and females deserve to become billionaires, too.
So let’s not vet her or delve into whether she’s lying or telling the truth, let’s just believe everything she says so she can succeed.
How many got suckered in over PC ( political correctness)?
Being that it’s now 2017 and Theranos has laid off much of their employees. Much pending legal woes etc…. will they survive…..is this any way to run a business….we kept our new technology a secret to keep competition away. ..or we opened our doors for. ……too many confusing statements…..like a dog chasing his tail. ..
If you’re apologizing to Thomas Edison, you clearly have no idea what kind of a man he really was.
Unsure whether SITE is active. Narcissistic greed, absent effectiveness. So, did China participate in funding the initial start-up? Holmes met Balwani in Beijing; she is fluent in Mandarin Chinese. And, if so, will China intercede to pay for her defense?