Theranos
Posted: Tue Jan 04, 2022 10:25 am
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... SApp_Other
Founder of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, convicted on four counts of fraud. Promised their tech would detect hundreds of conditions from a simple blood test, but could only do ten or twelve. To me, this demonstrates a huge flaw in Silicon Valley investment thinking. There’s a significant element of that startup culture that thinks that investing in tech will solve every problem and the bigger the problem, just chuckled more money at it and you’ll solve it. Need it done quicker? Fine, Chuck more money at it. Problem is they don’t differentiate between tech and science.
I’ve experienced this myself talking to small space companies, around high resolution images from orbit. There’s a hard physical limit on how fine a detail you can resolve for a particular size of telescope / camera. I’ve spoken to companies who want to do high resolution imaging from very small satellites and you can see in their faces that they can’t get their head round there being a limit - they think it’s a tech problem, and enough investment will find a solution (it won’t). I think that’s what has happened here. They’ve assumed because they can detect some health issues from a drop of blood, so they’ll be able to find markers for hundreds more, and develop them quickly by chucking cash at it. And come up against hard science blocks, which just ain’t going to go away. They’ve bought into their own hype, dug a hole for themselves and then kept digging when it was going wrong, in a blind faith that the solution was just around the corner (probably in the face of scientists telling them it wasn’t going to work).
Founder of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, convicted on four counts of fraud. Promised their tech would detect hundreds of conditions from a simple blood test, but could only do ten or twelve. To me, this demonstrates a huge flaw in Silicon Valley investment thinking. There’s a significant element of that startup culture that thinks that investing in tech will solve every problem and the bigger the problem, just chuckled more money at it and you’ll solve it. Need it done quicker? Fine, Chuck more money at it. Problem is they don’t differentiate between tech and science.
I’ve experienced this myself talking to small space companies, around high resolution images from orbit. There’s a hard physical limit on how fine a detail you can resolve for a particular size of telescope / camera. I’ve spoken to companies who want to do high resolution imaging from very small satellites and you can see in their faces that they can’t get their head round there being a limit - they think it’s a tech problem, and enough investment will find a solution (it won’t). I think that’s what has happened here. They’ve assumed because they can detect some health issues from a drop of blood, so they’ll be able to find markers for hundreds more, and develop them quickly by chucking cash at it. And come up against hard science blocks, which just ain’t going to go away. They’ve bought into their own hype, dug a hole for themselves and then kept digging when it was going wrong, in a blind faith that the solution was just around the corner (probably in the face of scientists telling them it wasn’t going to work).
