Bad Blood: The Theranos Story

If it seems too good to be true, dig a little deeper and you may find out that your instincts were well founded. I remember about two decades ago how a woman claimed to have solutions to the energy problem. I can't recall the details other than that it was clear this CEO had a very capable PR team. She was on the cover of several magazines, if I recall correctly. A year later, she was gone. 

Businesses work very hard to project a positive narrative and in a world as messy as ours, there are plenty of folk with money who are eager to invest in (and be part of) the next big thing. Who doesn't like stories that generate hope? We love the feeling of being amazed. 

Unfortunately, many of these stories are more mist than substance. Here's but one example: Theranos. The company's story is told in Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by journalist John Carreyrou. Released in May 2018, Carreryou covers the rise and fall of the multibillion-dollar biotech startup headed by Elizabeth Holmes.

The company was founded in 2003 by then-19-year-old Stanford dropout Holmes. Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft and Steve Jobs dropped out of college as well, so there's some glamor to these stories of dreamers who skip the formalities of a touted degree.

Holmes claimed that Theranos had developed a revolutionary new blood-testing technology that could run a wide range of tests from a single drop of blood. The story had legs, and Theranos quickly attracted the attention of investors, including a number of heavies like former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Senator Sam Nunn, and media mogul Rupert Murdoch. By 2014, Theranos was valued at $9 billion and Holmes was being hailed as the next Steve Jobs.

All this success drew attention to the company and with it came a skeptical WSJ journalist who began digging a little beneath the surface. When Carreyrou exposed the truth about the company's unfounded claims, Theranos collapsed and Holmes was eventually charged with fraud.

The problem here is that many of the people who invest in these "story companies" have no real understanding of the technology they're reading about, so they buy the yarn. Carreyrou's book is a story about ambition, hubris, and the lengths that people will go to in order to achieve success. Does the name Enron ring a bell? How about Bernie Madoff.

Ultimately, Holmes was convicted of wire fraud in January 2022 and sentenced to 11 years in a federal prison in November. Her attorneys put in an appeal, however, and the rest of the story is yet to be told.

Moral of the story: don't believe everything you read or hear.

Illustration is an AI-revised version of a painting by the author called The Student.

SHS: Should We Be Afraid?

I’m not sure if anyone saw the story a couple years ago linking television watching to what has now been labeled Sawdust Head Syndrome or SHS. There were some who cited a conspiracy of media and either the State or Justice Department to keep the story from going public. CBS was even planning a Sixty Minutes feature on the phenomenon, but under pressure from the Justice Department pulled the piece. Evidently, the TV networks, who helped foster the Alar scare which did huge damage to the apple industry that year, did not want people frightened into not watching television.

Sawdust Head Syndrome was discovered in an increasing number of instances where autopsies were performed and it was discovered that portions of the brain had become sawdust. I can’t recall all the details other than it somehow involved Columbia University. I vaguely recall that research into SHS was also being conducted at the University of MN and Stanford.

At first it was believed the sawdust like material was caused by either a bacteria or virus. When the link to excessive television viewing was finally established, the investigation went under wraps. I guess you can imagine what would happen to our court system if everyone who ever watched TV suddenly sued the TV manufacturers, or Best Buys and Circuit Cities where they bought their gear.

I just did a Google Search and actually found a few stories on the subject. The American Medical Association (AMA) also seems to have been implicated in the cover up. I also found a couple links from a blog to YouTube videos but they came up “file not found” so I’m not sure what’s going on there.

The article about the Justice Department came out in 2006, verifying that Stanford and the U of M were indeed aware of the matter. According to this article they were working in conjunction with the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. The piece ends by mentioning that TV sets might be forced to come with warning labels by 2007. I haven’t bought one lately, but if anyone has a new television, I’d be interested in knowing what kind of warnings it carries.

In another article, some of the first reported cases of SHS were from nursing homes where aides would occasionally find flecks of sawdust on patient’s pillows. The sawdust like material usually went unreported until a grad student from Temple University, who himself had been a former aide, made the correlation between the patients having sawdust on the pillows and television viewing.

Personally, I have long suspected that television has been having some kind of impact on our brains. For the purposes of comedy, if this story is proven true, it might also prove that to some extent we’re a nation of blockheads. TV could then be likened to a big saw.

And now, one wonders about the stories circulating that cell phones might cause cancer. Is this true as well, or just another story... or maybe there's another cover up. Should we be afraid?