Theranos Was a Good Investment [and still is!]

A counter-intuitive take on a cautionary tale.

I’m giving a grand rounds today, so we will all have to make do with a classic. In honor of Deepseek, and yesterday's $1.something trillion dollar plunge in capital markets (when everybody realizes there is a dramatically cheaper way to do AI), we return to a classic scam of modern healthcare. Yes, it's our now imprisoned Friend, Elizabeth Holmes. Theranos was a company that promised disruptive innovation in laboratory testing. A strange woman, blonde, intense, with a bizarrely low pitched vocal affectation, was taken completely seriously as she explained that, despite the laws of physics and human biology, everything we needed to know would come from a single drop of blood. She surrounded herself with eminent men, many of whom had military or political backgrounds, and none of them had any experience in health, biosciences, or anything relevant to the actual production of a laboratory product. This was all before a scams like cryptocurrency took over the world, which everybody …