The Blood Unicorn Theranos Was Just a Fairy Tale

It has been pretty obvious for a few years now that Theranos Inc. was a huge fraud. Theranos is a blood-testing startup that developed devices, which it called "TSPUs" and "miniLabs," that were supposed to be able to do a wide range of laboratory tests on a finger-prick blood sample. It seems like Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes really wanted to build devices that would actually do these things, and thought she could, and tried to. But it didn't work, and Theranos ran out of time: It talked Walgreens into offering Theranos tests at its stores,1521045562577 but "it became clear to Holmes that the miniLab would not be ready" in time for the Walgreens rollout. So she went with Plan B: "Theranos never used its miniLab for patient testing in its clinical laboratory," but did a dozen tests on the earlier-generation Theranos TSPU, 50 to 60 more tests on blood-test-analysis devices that it bought from other companies and modified to take finger-prick samples, and "the remaining 100-plus tests it offered" on regular unmodified devices bought from other companies or sent out to third-party laboratories. Meanwhile Theranos and Holmes were going around giving interviews about how revolutionary their technology was, without ever mentioning that it didn't work and they didn't use it. This got them a lot of favorable press and a $9 billion valuation, which went on for a while until the Wall Street Journal's John Carreyrou reported in 2015 that the product didn't work and that Theranos was lying about using it, after which Theranos fairly quickly collapsed.

But the fact that Theranos was a gigantic fraud doesn't quite mean that it committed fraud. It isn't exactly fraud to go around lying to journalists.1521046355647 People do it all the time! If you decide that you want to be a celebrity, and that the easiest path to fame is by convincing people that you've found a magical new blood test, you can lie about that to your heart's content, and if you fool people then that's their problem, not yours. Undeserved celebrity is a central fact of American life; if it was illegal to lie your way to fame then our politics, for one thing, would be very different.