This is the story the prizewinning Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou tells virtually to perfection in “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup,” which really amounts to two books. It wowed an associate dean at Stanford it persuaded Safeway and Walgreens to spend millions of dollars to set up clinics to showcase Theranos’s vaunted revolutionary technology.Īnd its founder, Elizabeth Holmes, was feted as a biomedical version of Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, a wunderkind college dropout who would make blood testing as convenient as the iPhone. The company was the subject of adoring media profiles it attracted a who’s who of retired politicos to its board, among them George Shultz and Henry Kissinger. In Theranos’s brief, Icarus-like existence as a Silicon Valley darling, marquee investors including Robert Kraft, Betsy DeVos and Carlos Slim shelled out $900 million. The devices Biden saw weren’t close to being workable they had been staged for the visit.īiden was not the only one conned. Biden saw rows of impressive-looking equipment - the company’s supposedly game-changing device for testing blood - and offered glowing praise for “the laboratory of the future.” In 2015, Vice President Joe Biden visited the Newark, Calif., laboratory of a hot new start-up making medical devices: Theranos. BAD BLOOD Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup By John Carreyrou 352 pp.
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