Monday, September 6, 2021

Elizabeth Holmes = Design Flaw

by Drew Martin
Much has been said of and written about Elizabeth Holmes, the "genius"-impersonator who raised $9B to feed her farcical blood-testing company, Theranos, which is a portmanteau she concocted from “therapy” and “diagnosis”. Ironically, speakers of the Greek language say it resembles the word for death and other ominous meanings.

So I will not add much more to the chatter. Her trial has started. The jury has been selected. It is going to be a roller coaster ride. And as guilty as she is, I can see her being acquitted - she's newly married with a newborn baby*, and she's blaming everything on abuses she says she suffered from Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani who was the president and chief operating officer of Theranos (and her secret lover during his time at the company). It's totally absurd, but a jury might buy it. And as she once said, "I am too pretty to go to jail."

Her looks had a lot to do with this (blondes have more funds). She charmed her multi-millionaire board members who were older white men, none of them in biotech. Her young age and false promises were a fountain of youth for them.

One thing that struck me as particularly interesting was the "time machine" she "designed" as a kid. I have heard Holmes talk about it from a clip shared in the podcasts The Dropout, and Bad Blood, and it's mentioned in Ken Auletta's New Yorker article, Blood, Simpler from 2014. Holmes is quoted saying:

"I still have a notebook with a complete design for a time machine that I designed when I must have been, like, seven. The wonderful thing about the way I was raised is that no one ever told me that I couldn’t do those things.”

In the audio clip she elaborates by saying her drawing showed how everything would work (after all, as she said it was a "complete" design). Holmes uses this childhood story to explain how she was always inventing but it's also a pretty good metaphor for the failure of her company. Edison, the device that was supposed to have run hundreds of tests on a drop of blood, and which she claimed was being used on the battlefields of Afghanistan, was a lemon...never worked, never used in battle or Walgreens (a deceitful partnership that actually helped raise the valuation from $1B to $9B).

And that last part of the quote has something very millennial about it...The wonderful thing about the way I was raised is that no one every told me that I couldn't do those things. It's not about hard work we find in the saying of the actual Thomas Edison, "Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration" or about
 responsibility, or practicality...it's about fantasy and playtime, and that's great to develop creativity in children and adults, and to take a break from reality but it's a playtime Holmes extended into the real world to scam investors and later to unremorsefully party at Burning Man as Theranos crashed and burned.

Even bankrupt John DeLorean, who was charged with defrauding investors, manufactured 9,000 road-worthy cars and he was an actual skilled engineer and inventor who developed several successful automobiles for General Motors before leaving to start his own company. Holmes has been compared more to ponzi-scheme fraudster Bernie Madoff who died this year in federal prison. He had illegally accumulated nearly $65B.

Sometimes I think...Well at least she did this or that (insert actual accomplishment). For example, she learned Mandarin and claims to be fluent. Learning a language is difficult and admirable, and in her cas it only added to her aura, but not the technical underpinnings and scientific know-how of biotech. Then there's her Vaporware patent. That's legit, right? As patent attorney Brett Trout points out in his post Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos, and the Patenting of Vaporware, the examiners at the USPTO (United States Patent and Trade Office)...

"...have no ability to use the written description of a patent application to try to actually build or use the claimed invention. In many cases, especially in the case of complex technology, confirming the patent accurately describes how to make or use a viable technology would require massive amounts of time and money to produce a prototype. Given the rarity of applicants spending massive amounts of money try to patent a technology that does not exist, forcing the USPTO to conduct experiments to determine the viability of every claimed invention would be a massive waste of time and resources. The USPTO is, therefore, left with no choice, but to assume that the patent applicant has described the technology in the patent application sufficiently to allow a person of ordinary skill in the art to produce the claimed technology."

If Holmes had tried to patent something knowingly impossible, such as her time machine, or a perpetual motion machine promising free and unlimited energy, the examiner would have turned it down. In other words, Holmes got a patent on fake technology only because it was not known as fake. It's Theranos in a nutshell. It's Holmes through and through. So it's not that her Edison machines had a design flaw, it's that they were based on fake technology. Holmes' thinking is the design flaw.

Trout raises the question of why this situation at the USPTO is not a bigger problem. 

"...a patent only gives the patent owner the right to stop someone else from making, using, or selling, the technology claimed in the patent. If the technology does not exist, the patent owner has no rights to enforce. Second, if a patent owner were to get a patent on fake technology and then try to enforce its patent against a competitor making a different product, the competitor would investigate the patent, and call in experts to invalidate the patent in court, by proving that the description in the patent does not describe a technology in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art to make or use the technology. So even if the USPTO were to grant a patent on a technology that does not exist, the market would ordinarily weed out those patents before they can do any harm."

And that's how Theranos went down...they were weeded out.

As a kid I was interested in prosthetics because of my fascination with the show, The Six Million Dollar Man. Unlike other superhero stories at that time, this was about empowering a disabled man with so much technology that he was superhuman. I was concerned about blindness so I designed an artificial eye. It "plugged" into the optic nerve, which a teacher laughed at and said was impossible. It was farfetched like Holmes' time machine, and that incompleteness to the design was something I took to heart. A year or two later, I watched on TV a one-legged runner hobble through a marathon on a straight, crude prosthetic leg with a raw leg stump where it was attached. This was decades before blades, so I sketched out an artificial leg for runners. I was a young teenager when I conceived it but it shows some realistic thinking: it used a rubber prosthetic foot that was new to market, and existing buckle closures I knew from ski boots. It had discs that could be added to adjust for the height of the athlete, and a spring loaded knee, which was something I thought would make it more natural for running. You could see how it could work with some re-engineering. It was a practical improvement of what was available at the time when more disabled people were pursuing athletic endeavors. 


Will there one day be technology to run accurate 300 tests on a drop of blood? Most certainly. But it will happen through advancements in research and development, and under peer review, not through fantasies of privileged kid. Scientists such as Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein, who made conceptual leaps, landed on a surface they created. They envisioned the other side of the misty void. Holmes jumped without knowing how far that other side was and what it would take to get there.

*And not to get into the atrocious state of the prison system in the United States, but much has been said about jurors being sympathetic to Holmes having just given birth, and people questioning the timing before she might serve twenty years in prison. Wanda Bertram and Wendy Sawyer wrote an article on the The Prison Policy Initiative about the incarceration of mothers and pregnant women.

"...80% of the women who will go to jail this year are mothers — including 55,000 women who are pregnant when they are admitted. Beyond having to leave their children in someone else’s care, these women will be impacted by the brutal side effects of going to jail: Aggravation of mental health problems, a greater risk of suicide, and a much higher likelihood of ending up homeless or deprived of essential financial benefits."

It states that jail/prison separates 2.3 million mothers from their children and that many who are incarcerated are awaiting trial simply because they can’t afford bail.

No one should waste his or her life in prison but Holmes is guilty of scamming $9B and harming more than a million Theranos patients. If she is acquitted she will brush the whole trial off as a bother and slink back into a privileged life. She'll write a book or perform some other egregious act. If she's not going to prison I hope she is ordered to 20 years of full time community service to help the children and families of mothers in jail because one thing that has not been mentioned in any of this is race, and in the end an acquittal will be based primarily on the fact that she is a white mother.