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US Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos's Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani (wsj.com)
John Carreyrou, reporting for WSJ: Federal prosecutors filed criminal charges against Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and the blood-testing company's former No. 2 executive, alleging that they defrauded investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars and also defrauded doctors and patients. The indictments of Ms. Holmes and Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, Theranos's former president and chief operating officer who was also Ms. Holmes's boyfriend, are the culmination of a two-and-a-half-year investigation by the U.S. attorney's office in San Francisco, sparked by articles in The Wall Street Journal that raised questions about the company's technology and practices. Ms. Holmes, 34 years old, and Mr. Balwani, 53, were charged with two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and nine counts of wire fraud in an indictment handed up Thursday and unsealed Friday.
I've read the book. The details are so much worse than anything you have read in the news articles about Theranos.
Theranos never developed *anything*. Their automated super-high-tech lab system was a commercially available 3-axis glue dispenser that they stuck pipettes onto. I tried to imagine what it must have been like as a new hire, getting fed the "change the world" crap and signing on with the company, and then seeing the cover opened on that kludge for the first time.
But of course almost no one saw the working innards of the machine, because Balwani the too old boyfriend created a compartmentalized, CIA like structure where no one was allowed to talk to each other. The engineers building the system's microfluidics weren't allowed to talk to the biochemists who were working on the tests. How could that possibly work?
And then anyone who questioned the plan or the message got fired. So many people got fired; whole teams got fired. People went on demos and saw them fail! Any mention of failure? Fired.
IMO, the one person most responsible for this whole debacle who has not yet been held to account is Channing Robertson, who was a senior engineering faculty at Stanford and upon whose bona fides this whole thing started. He may not be legally responsible, but he's the adult in the room who first bought the hype, and he HAD TO have known that the whole damn thing was vaporware. "Fake it til you make it" is not okay in medicine.