June 19, 2018

You Really Need to Read About Theranos

Elizabeth Holmes and her "big blue unblinking eyes" as photographed by Martin Schoeller for the Theranos website.Theranos Inc.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

I have an ongoing joke about how I’m full of great ideas but no one ever listens to me. Like, teleportation would be great! Why won’t the scientists listen to me and invent it? Do I have to do everything around here?

Yeah, it’s lame. But I’m now reading Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, by John Carreyrou. He’s the Wall Street Journal reporter who started exposing Silicon Valley darling Theranos as a fraud a few years ago, and the book is…

…just astounding. From reading Carreyrou’s Journal pieces, I thought I more or less knew the Theranos story. But no. It’s basically a real-life version of my joke. Elizabeth Holmes had an idea: wouldn’t it be great if we could do hundreds of blood tests with just a tiny thumb prick of blood? And that was it. She was a freshman chemical engineering major who dropped out of Stanford and had no idea how to do this. She literally had nothing. She just thought it was a good idea. Based on that, she was able to raise millions of dollars and hire hundreds of people to see if they could bring her idea to life.

They couldn’t. It was sort of like someone saying, wouldn’t it be great if we could cure diabetes? It sure would! Now go invent something that does it.

But as bizarre as this sounds, that was Theranos. And even more bizarrely, it’s not even the weirdest thing about the whole story. For starters, Elizabeth Holmes, who was 22 when she started the company, literally sounds like a modern-day Svengali. She simply stared at people earnestly with her “big blue unblinking eyes” and they were mesmerized into giving her money and letting her do anything she wanted with it.

If you’re looking for something to take your mind off the current political horrors, I really recommend this book. It is far more fascinating than I expected.

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate