Between the Lines - Bad Blood
July’s Pick - Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, by John Carreyrou
Thoughts
Last month’s Between the Lines installment offered up a short summer reading list that included Carreyrou’s book, Bad Blood. I kicked off my summer reading with this book, and I am glad I did. In that post, I mentioned that my husband couldn’t put it down, but what I didn’t say is that he couldn’t stop talking about it either. Not wanting to poke fun at him at the time, I left that detail out but having just finished the book myself, I totally get his fascination/obsession with this story. This book is mind-blowing, and I, too, can’t help but talk about it to anyone who will listen. Carreyrou’s book reads like a John Grisham novel, except of course this isn’t a crime fiction novel, it is a true crime piece of investigative journalism. It is investigative journalism at its finest: meticulously researched and well-told. Carreyrou first broke this story in 2015 in a series of articles he wrote for the Wall Street Journal. The combination of his doggedness and the bravery of a few resolute whistle-blowers exposed what has turned out to be one of the biggest cases of corporate fraud ever. This is the story of the rise and fall of Theranos, the multi-billion dollar biotech startup founded by a 19 year old Stanford dropout, named Elizabeth Holmes. Theranos was built on the promise of faster, easier, cheaper and less painful blood testing. The company set out to “disrupt” the blood-testing industry. Theranos’s claim was that from a single drop of blood from a finger prick they could run hundreds of different blood tests. Their blood testing device, in its first iteration called the Edison, (you guessed it named after Thomas Edison) would be in homes, supermarkets, drug stores and on the battlefield. Holmes’ angle was that having access to our blood health at all times was a basic human right. The problem with the vision was - it didn’t work, it never did, not even 15 years in and 900 million dollars from investors later. This book is filled with astonishing details of deceit, fraud, greed and intimidation. What Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani couldn’t do with their technology, they did with high powered attorneys, scare tactics, surveilleance and sheer facade and trickery and this worked for quite a long time. The media was in no small measure unwittingly part of the con. Elizabeth Holmes was lauded alternately as a genius, a female Steve Jobs (don’t get me started on the many ways she adopted his mystique to advance her own), as brilliant as Archimedes and Mozart. The Theranos board of directors read like a who’s who and at various times included former Secretaries of State George Schultz and Henry Kissinger, General James Mattis, the high profile attorney, David Bois, Riley Bechtel, former Bechtel Group CEO, William Foege, former director CDC , Richard Kovacevich, former Wells Fargo CEO and chairman and so on. If there ever was a sincere desire to bring a new medical device to the marketplace, it got lost in lies, double-talk, and secrecy. The final chapter of the book is entitled “The Empress has No Clothes” , - a more apt comparison could not have been made.
Overall
Two thumbs up! 5 stars! Not to be missed!
P.S. I wrote last month that The Dropout podcast (April’s Six pick) which includes exclusive interviews with employees, patients, and investors would make a nice companion piece to the book. After listening to the podcast as well as reading the book, I stand by that. Plus it’s fun to hear the voices of some of the people you meet in the book. “Bad Blood,” the movie, is slated to be released in 2020.
P.P.S. A friend, who is an attorney, recently sent me an article (find it here) concerning her trial. If Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani are not held accountable it will be a real travesty. Apparently, the year long delay of this trial gives Elizabeth a lot of time to manuever - boo :(
Kathryn