I mentioned on Twitter a few days
ago that I’d finished reading John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood, which I was interested in, but had forgotten about until
hearing an interview with the author on the education podcast Have You Heard. As with pretty much
every episode of the podcast, it’s a bit slanted for my taste, but on the other
hand, I know what the bias is, and I learn a lot from every episode.
Anyway,
about the book, it was amazing and enraging, the latter on many levels. First
of all, the book reads well, and while it certainly is not a detached telling
either, for reasons that become apparent at the end of the book, I never once
doubted the essential veracity of the tale. For those of you that might be unaware,
it is about the start-up Theranos that was the darling of Silicon Valley and the
biotech industry for nearly a decade, both for what it promised, easy, less
invasive blood testing done quickly and for its charismatic founder, Elizabeth
Holmes. In particular, it was such a good story because in the male dominated
world of Silicon Valley, it was the story of a woman that was every bit as good
as if not better than the boys, after all, she wasn’t promoted to an executive
spot, the whole thing was her idea. Who wouldn’t want to root for that story?
Following
tech news over the past few years will let you know the outcome ahead of time,
and I had a pretty solid interest from the very first time I heard about it. I
spent some pretty formative years, five or so during and after college, working
in the blood testing arena for 3 different pathology labs. For a while I wanted
to be a medical technologist but chose another path. That is part of the first
reason this book was so enraging. The whole time the actual work, the testing
of blood samples wasn’t the top priority, heck, it wasn’t even the third or
fourth. It was all fakery and illusion the whole time, and throughout the whole
process there was really no medical oversight in any way. As Carreyrou rightly
points out, this isn’t just some app that sells ads or does microtransactions
that rip people off. People’s lives are at risk with medical testing, and yet
no one that had power in the situation gave a rip about that. That’s not really
shocking considering the acidic effects of unbridled lust for riches and notoriety,
but it certainly is maddening.
That
leads me to the other thing that enraged me. As much as the book is the story
of a company and a person, Holmes, gone very bad, it was also very illuminating
about what really matters in a world where profit is king. Connections…with the
right connections, you don’t have to have a good idea, you don’t have prove
anything, you can put anyone at risk as long as you can sell it and posit a
solid ROI. Again, not shocking, but the blind spots shown by the people who already
had wealth and power in the attempts to get more wealth and power were truly heart
wrenching. It brought back to me the feeling I’ve had ever since reading C.S.
Lewis’ The Inner Ring, that of
powerlessness, of knowing that no matter how hard one works, no matter what you
know, it is really about who you know. And those networked connections matter
even more than familial ones, see the case of George Schultz and his grandson.
The grandson blows the whistle on the problems at Theranos, but his grandfather
doesn’t believe him. Probably because believe him would mean admitting that the
connections that led him there were wrong.
The
final piece of the anger I had while reading the book was just this, that there
are few consequences for those in the inner ring. The oligarchs never seem to
pay the price, Rupert Murdoch just wrote off his $100 million loss and called
it a day. And yes, Holmes may end up with some jail time, but the rest of the
folks who backed the company, well, no worries, their investment just didn’t
pay off. But this wasn’t just an investment, this was coercion, stalking, dirty
underhanded legal tactics (I feel I could write a whole other paragraph on
that), and as stated before, risking people’s lives.
The
truly painful thing is that it didn’t really have to be this way. Holmes had a
laudable idea, if of course zero knowledge or seeming desire to attain the
knowledge, or to listen to those who had the knowledge. Had she hired some real
doctors, listened to them, had some humility, really wanted to help people
instead of trying to be someone else (Steve Jobs in her case). If the investors
and companies that bought into Theranos looked for more than a nice sales pitch
and claims of disruption and revolution, something really good could have been
accomplished.
To go full
circle back, I totally agree with Ms. Berkshire’s assessment in the Have You Heard podcast that a lot of
ed-tech promises sound the same way. The world is promised, disruption is the
byword and school systems jump on the hot new thing with little study, little
idea of how to implement things and just believe that tech = magic and some wand
waving will make it all right. And as a teacher, that is what ultimately worried
me the most as I read the book.
Wrapping
up, the book was great, I highly recommend it. It reads almost like a fiction
book in many ways, intriguing throughout. The added benefit is the timeliness
of the whole story.
