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By Roger Lowenstein

• May 21, 2018

BAD BLOOD Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup By John Carreyrou 352 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.

In 2015, Vice President Joe Biden visited the Newark, Calif., laboratory of a hot new start-up making medical devices: Theranos. 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.”

The lab was a fake. The devices Biden saw weren’t close to being workable; they had been staged for the visit.

Biden was not the only one conned. 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 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. 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.

And 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.

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. The first is a chilling, third-person narrative of how Holmes came up with a fantastic idea that made her, for a while, the most successful woman entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. She cast a hypnotic spell on even seasoned investors, honing an irresistible pitch about a little girl who was afraid of needles and who now wanted to improve the world by providing faster, better blood tests.

Her beguiling concept was that by a simple pinprick — drawing only a drop or two of blood — Theranos could dispense with the hypodermic needle, which she likened to a gruesome medieval torture, and perform a full range of blood tests in walk-in clinics and, ultimately, people’s homes. The premise was scientifically dubious, and Theranos’s technology was either not ready, unworkable or able to perform only a fraction of the tests promised. Many of the people who showed up at clinics actually had their blood drawn from old-fashioned needles. And most of the tests were graded not by Theranos’s proprietary technology, but by routine commercially available equipment.

Despite warnings from employees that Theranos wasn’t ready to go live on human subjects — its devices were likened to an eighth-grade science project — Holmes was unwilling to disappoint investors or her commercial partners. The result was a fiasco. Samples were stored at incorrect temperatures. Patients got faulty results and were rushed to emergency rooms. People who called Theranos to complain were ignored; employees who questioned its technology, its quality control or its ethics were fired. Ultimately, nearly a million tests conducted in California and Arizona had to be voided or corrected.

The author’s description of Holmes as a manic leader who turned coolly hostile when challenged is ripe material for a psychologist; Carreyrou wisely lets the evidence speak for itself. As presented here, Holmes harbored delusions of grandeur but couldn’t cope with the messy realities of bioengineering. Swathed in her own reality distortion field, she dressed in black turtlenecks to emulate her idol Jobs and preached that the Theranos device was “the most important thing humanity has ever built.” Employees were discouraged from questioning this cultish orthodoxy by her “ruthlessness” and her “culture of fear.” Secrecy was obsessive. Labs and doors were equipped with fingerprint scanners.

The heart of the problem, Carreyrou writes, was that “Holmes and her company overpromised and then cut corners when they couldn’t deliver.” To hide those shortcuts, they lied. Theranos invented revenue estimates “from whole cloth.” It boasted of mysterious contracts with pharmaceutical companies that never seemed to be available for viewing. It spread the story that the United States Army was using its devices on the battlefield and in Afghanistan — a fabrication.

Even for a private company like Theranos, disclosure is the bedrock of American capitalism — the “disinfectant” that allows investors to gauge a company’s prospects. Based on Carreyrou’s dogged reporting, not even Enron lied so freely.

Carreyrou’s presentation has a few minor flaws. He introduces scores of characters and, after a while, it becomes hard to keep track of them. In describing these many players he sometimes relies on stereotypes. Of an employee “built like an N.F.L. lineman” the author writes, “his physique belied a sharp intellect.” Actually, it didn’t; big people can also have sharp intellects.

Such blemishes in no way detract from the power of “Bad Blood.” In the second part of the book the author compellingly relates how he got involved, following a tip from a suspicious reader. His recounting of his efforts to track down sources — many of whom were being intimidated by Theranos’s bullying lawyer, David Boies — reads like a West Coast version of “All the President’s Men.” The author is admirably frank about his craft. He feels a “familiar rush” when he hears that patient false negatives could be life threatening — i.e., that he’s onto a big story.

In the end, Carreyrou got the Boies treatment — angry (but ultimately hollow) threats of a lawsuit. Holmes also pleaded with Rupert Murdoch — the power behind The Wall Street Journal and, as it happened, her biggest investor — to kill the story. It’s a good moment in American journalism when Murdoch says he’ll leave it to the editors.

After Carreyrou’s front-page exposé was published in 2015, Theranos’s business prospects collapsed, directors resigned and the S.E.C. sued Holmes for fraud (she settled). The company also settled private suits. Federal regulators, already on the trail, found numerous violations, including sloppy lab procedures and unreliable equipment. Theranos, they determined, put patient health in “immediate jeopardy.” Several of the labs have been shuttered. Carreyrou has reported that Theranos is under criminal investigation and probably headed for liquidation.

The question of how it got so far — more than 800 employees and a paper valuation of $9 billion — will fascinate business school classes for years. The first line of defense should have been the board, and its failure was shocking. Some of the directors displayed a fawning devotion to Holmes — in effect becoming cheerleaders rather than overseers. Shultz helped his grandson land a job; when the kid reported back that the place was rotten, Grandpa didn’t believe him. There is a larger moral here: The people in the trenches know best. The V.I.P. directors were nectar for investor bees, but they had no relevant expertise.

Even outsiders could have spotted red flags, but averted their eyes as if they wanted to believe. Fishy excuses — Holmes blamed a production delay on an earthquake in Japan — were blithely accepted. When a Walgreens team visited Theranos it pointedly asked for — and was denied — permission to see the lab. A company consultant pleaded that the chain not go ahead with in-store clinics. “Someday this is going to be a black eye,” he predicted. But Walgreens was plagued by a “fear of missing out.” Like many executives, they were looking over their shoulder and not at the evidence.

Surely, no one suspected a lie that big. The fundamental premise “was to help people, and not to harm them,” Walgreens recounted, in a legal brief that sounded stunned. Yet another explanation is the gilt-edged and magical status that society confers on Silicon Valley, as a place where fantasies come true.

Roger Lowenstein, formerly a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, is the author, most recently, of “America’s Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve.”

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Bad Blood, book review: The rise and fall of Theranos

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup • By John Carreyrou • Picador • 339 pages • ISBN: 978-1509868063 • £20

First they think you're crazy, then they fight you...and then they prosecute you for fraud because you were lying when you said you could change the world.

To be young, gifted, and blonde rarely hurt anyone trying to make their way through the world, and Elizabeth Holmes was no exception. By now, the basics of her story are fairly well-known: she dropped out of Stanford at 19 with a plan to revolutionise medical blood testing. The idea behind Theranos was transformative. Instead of drawing blood from people's veins, develop methods for testing on the much smaller volume produced by a finger prick. Less fear, less pain, and less medical knowledge needed. People would be able to do their own blood tests in their homes and have the results uploaded to their doctor for interpretation.

The fatal flaw in this plan was that medical testing isn't like software, where it's routine to handwave over the bits that don't work yet -- and anyway you're not liable because, see, it's right there in the clickwrap licence that whatever happens it's not your fault. Instead, with people's lives at stake, you've got regulators and scientists, who are used to inspecting devices closely and expect peer review. These folks lack a sense of humour about fakery.

But young, gifted, and blonde makes an impression, and the collection of names that Holmes collected as investors and board members is astonishing, though weirdly eclectic. Her board included Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State George Shultz, and a smattering of former senators and other political bigwigs. The leaders of both the drugstore chain Walgreen's, and Safeway saw in Theranos the opportunity to reinvent their businesses at a time when new directions were needed. Rupert Murdoch invested $125 million of his own money. The famed lawyer David Boies took payment in shares to represent the company in attacking critics. On YouTube you can see former president Bill Clinton's enchantment.

SEE: Launching and building a startup: A founder's guide (free PDF)

The collapse began in late 2015, when Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou told the world that the devices did not work as advertised. Holmes, who had been giddily enjoying the awards and attention, began facing less friendly interviews. In these , she displayed all the evasiveness and aggressive refusal to answer questions of a recent Supreme Court nominee.

In Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup , Carreyrou tells the entire astounding story, based on the extensive research he did for the 30 articles his newspaper published, beginning with Holmes's personal background and ending with her settling fraud charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner working for the leading US financial newspaper carries weight that is not easily dismissed, and despite lawsuits, threats and terrified witnesses, Carreyrou has long since been proven right. Holmes has had to pay back millions for voided medical tests and lost investments, and watch her personal net worth crash from $4.5 billion to zero. Now, Holmes and her former COO, Sunny Balwani , are facing criminal indictments for fraud. They are pleading not guilty.

One interesting note on the dynamics of being a woman in business. Carreyrou unearthed a suggestion that Holmes's natural voice is much higher than the unusually deep one sported by her public persona. Some internet commenters appear to find this offensively fake. Yet a young woman with a high voice is genuinely disadvantaged in business, and if Holmes had succeeded we'd call her 'smart'. Margaret Thatcher, who famously took voice lessons to deepen her voice and give it that authoritative ability to cut through the braying House of Commons like a buzzsaw, certainly was.

The lesson here, such as it is, should not be "See? You can't trust women entrepreneurs". Instead, it should be: no matter how charismatic the leader of the business is, and no matter how good their story, you must get appropriate experts to check out their claims. Investors were dazzled by the names on Holmes's board. That was fine in the 1980s when nascent businesses were writing hobbyist software. But today software has real consequences for safety in the physical world, and Silicon Valley investors can't go on "asking forgiveness, not permission". Due diligence has to mean more than following the person-to-person chain of trust.

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By John Carreyrou, A thrilling and sensational story of ambition, corporate fraud and deceit

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou tells the story of Theranos, a biotech startup that had a staggering rise to a close to $10 billion valuation and an even more dramatic fall.

The very short version of this review: I was really impressed by this book.

Being in the Bay Area, I’ve heard so much about this, but figured it was mostly hype. When it finally popped up on Bill Gates’s list of Best Books of 2018 a few days ago, I decided to take the plunge.

Theranos Website Screenshot

Book Summary

For the Detailed Chapter-By-Chapter Summary, click here or scroll all the way down .

Bad Blood covers the fall of Theranos, a startup that was founded by Stanford drop-out Elizabeth Holmes when she was nineteen. It claimed to offer faster, cheaper blood tests from just a pinprick of blood ( see their demonstration on YouTube ), as opposed to traditional methods which require needles, lab equipment and technicians.

Over the course of a decade, it ballooned to a valuation of almost $10 billion, but within a few short years was defunct once it became clear their technology was not what they claimed. It’s a saga that ensnared a range of tech, legal, political and other industry leaders such as Henry Kissinger, Rupert Murdoch, and our current Secretary of Defense John Mattis.

While a number of articles have profiled the big issues — they were lying, duh — Bad Blood does a deep dive into the company’s culture and the thousand small decisions that preceded Theranos’ downfall. In also covers the war Theranos waged as the walls slowly started closing in on their fraud. Both Elizabeth and the company’s COO are currently facing serious jail time for wire fraud.

The book’s author, John Carreyrou, is the Wall Street Journal journalist who first started reporting on possible malfeasance at Theranos. He first reported in October 2015 that Theranos was secretly using traditional blood testing machines to test blood instead of their own technology.

I think Bill Gates’s description (which sold me on this book) sums it up nicely: “The story is even crazier than I expected, and I found myself unable to put it down once I started. This book has everything: elaborate scams, corporate intrigue, magazine cover stories, ruined family relationships, and the demise of a company once valued at nearly $10 billion.”

Theranos Walgreens Launch Ad

Book Review

Bad Blood was one of the quickest reads I’ve had in a while. It’s so tantalizingly full of lies and terrible decisions and secrets that it hooks you in for the same reasons you can’t help slowing down just a little when driving past the scene of an accident.

The book paints a compelling image of a girl driven by stories of her family’s past greatness and current state of embarrassment, leveraging both powerful family and personal connections to support her grandiose vision.

Lies and secrecy are used to compensate for the unfulfilled promise of the technology itself. And in the company, those who raise concerns are fired while sycophants are promoted — all of which sets up Theranos for its eventual downfall.

Some of my interest was due having familiarity with many aspects of the book (I previously lived in the city the company was based in, visited the same hangouts, I’m all too familiar with startup pitfalls and founders who think they’re the next Steve Jobs, and I worked for the firm that served as their outside corporate counsel) as a Bay Area tech person. But, I’m pretty sure the drama seeping out from these pages is lurid enough to capture most people’s attention even without all that.

Carryrou has done a commendable job of making the book immensely accessible and readible, helped along by the subject matter itself. It’s a nutty story, even for Silicon Valley standards, mostly because of how out of control things got.

While erratic founders, lack of management skills and startups lying to investors and employees is not remotely notable, Theranos’s scale and subject matter — risking people’s ability to make smart health decisions — took things to another level. Any time you throw billion dollar valuations and cancer patients into the mix, it all gets worse.

And then, by the time the book reaches the point where Carreyrou’s begins his investigation, things have gone totally off the rails, with numerous people risking a lot to help expose the company, private investigators getting called in and armies of lawyers on the march as Theranos was clearly ready to fight to the death.

I was enthralled pretty much throughout the whole book, and I was really impressed by how Carreyrou really took the time to understand the technology, the tech industry, the legal issues and everything else related to the topic. The book wasn’t just interesting, it felt very credible. As someone who routinely whines about the quality of tech and legal reporting, I’m not an easy customer in this department.

Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes

Some Small Caveats

That all said, while I clearly enjoyed the book, a quick caveat about Bad Blood I’d point out is that the book is fairly limited in scope — this is one company’s dirty, dirty laundry being aired out. It’s a takedown of two awful people and their massive egos. The schadenfreude in this one runs deep .

I also think the book goes way too easy on the other enablers, decision-makers and people who are supposed to be leaders around them. Theranos attracted top talent (and therefore big dollars) partially due to the deep industry connections and people with deep experience that it was associated with, including a few industry luminaries. The idea that this girl and her boyfriend ran circles around all of these powerless lambs struck me as trying too hard to mold one specific narrative.

Carreyrou routinely dismisses bad behavior from others at Theranos as stemming from “pressure from Elizabeth” or plain ignorance. He also notes often the many, many times people “disapproved” of various unethical practices, but seems to give them a free pass. I get that they’re not really the subject of this book, but ultimately all these people were complicit. Disapproving internally but then doing nothing about it is not good enough.

A Minor Quibble for Music/Science Lovers

Finally, as a very, very minor quibble, it bothered me when he described her natural voice as being “several octaves” above her affected speaking voice (she thinks speaking with a low voice helps her to be taken seriously or something), and that this phrase has been echoed in articles all over because of it. An octave is not some vague indicator of some type of difference in pitch – it is a specific, measurable distance and frequency away from another note. (For you science nerds, the ratio of the frequency of two notes that are one octave apart is 2:1, with the higher note having the higher frequency.)

“Several octaves” is a lot, since most people’s entire vocal range (i.e. the highest and lowest note you can reach) probably spans around two octaves unless you’ve had vocal training — Beyonce likely has a 4-octave vocal range, for example (if judged by her music). Unless Holmes has the voice of a very small chipmunk, I doubt she speaks “several octaves” higher than her affected voice.

Read It or Skip It?

I was entranced by all the drama. Judge me all you want. It’s essentially a thrilling, sensational, schadenfreude-y tale that’s quite frankly fascinating to read. (My apologies to my dog who had to keep begging me to take her to the park instead of reading.)

From the difficulties of designing the blood tests, to the many legal issues involves in various aspects of the story, I was impressed by the level of detail and how accessible Carreyrou made all of that information. It’s excellent in-depth reporting by a highly capable writer. (Plus as a blogger, I loved that Carreyrou acknowledged he was tipped off on the story by a blogger who he’d spoken to in the past.)

It is, of course, drama of the business variety, so you’ll have to decide if that interests you.

Predictably, a movie based on Bad Blood is currently in development with Jennifer Lawrence slated to play the villianous, bleached-blond, steely-eyed disgraced founder.

Is Bad Blood something you think you’d read? Please share your thoughts below if you’ve read it! See Bad Blood on Amazon .

(P.S. I’ve started making notes in Goodreads when I post a review, so feel free to follow along!)

Detailed Book Summary (Spoilers)

1. a purposeful life (elizabeth’s background), 2. the gluebot (the inital prototypes), 3. apple envy (holmes's idolization of apple and jobs), 4. goodbye east paly (therano's move to central palo alto), 5. the childhood neighbor (fuisz's patent), 6. sunny (elizabeth's boyfriend), 7. dr. j (theranos's walgreens partnership), 8. the minilab (development of theranos's new device), 9. the wellness play (theranos's safeway partnership), 10. “who is ltc shoemaker” (theranos's military contract), 11. lighting a fuisz (the fuisz patent case begins), 12. ian gibbons (the fuisz patent case: a missing witness), 13. chiat\day (website and ad launch), 14. going live (walgreens launch lead-up), 15. unicorn (more funding), 16. the grandson (tyler schultz, whistleblower), 17. fame (media attention), 18. the hippocratic oath (theranos skeptics), 19. the tip (carreyrou's involvement), 20. the ambush (tyler vs. theranos's lawyers), 21. trade secrets (theranos on the attack), 22. la mattanza (waiting to publish), 23. damage control (publication and post-publication), 24. the empress has no clothes (theranos shut-down).

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SECRETS AND LIES IN A SILICON VALLEY STARTUP

by John Carreyrou ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 21, 2018

Already slated for feature film treatment, Carreyrou’s exposé is a vivid, cinematic portrayal of serpentine Silicon Valley...

A deep investigative report on the sensationalistic downfall of multibillion-dollar Silicon Valley biotech startup Theranos.

Basing his findings on hundreds of interviews with people inside and outside the company, two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning Wall Street Journal reporter Carreyrou rigorously examines the seamy details behind the demise of Theranos and its creator, Elizabeth Holmes. Founded in 2003, when Holmes was just 19, the company’s claim to “fame” was its revolutionary blood-testing system, which touted the detection of everything from high cholesterol to hepatitis C to cancer using only one drop of blood. While raising $9 billion through a series of aggressive (and falsified) claims and dozens of private investors, the company’s spiking net worth caught Carreyrou’s attention a few years ago. His eye-opening reporting on the company’s inaccurate, voided, or corrected test results, as well as the loss of major retail partnerships with Walgreens and Safeway, knocked Theranos off the tech radar and left it irreversibly devastated. The author glosses over Holmes’ history as an unpopular high schooler and, later, Stanford dropout, focusing on her early vision of the specialized blood-reading equipment, the rapid evolution of Theranos, and the early skepticism about the device’s efficacy and reliability. The well-integrated employee profiles and testimonies effectively support Carreyrou’s damning narrative and discredit Holmes as a power-hungry, avaricious young leader who courted venture capitalists with specious claims. Former Theranos employees paint Holmes as an increasingly tyrannical leader who demanded allegiance and who swiftly terminated those who she felt fell short of ultimate loyalty. The author brilliantly captures the interpersonal melodrama, hidden agendas, gross misrepresentations, nepotism, and a host of delusions and lies that further fractured the company’s reputation and halted its rise. More recently, the Securities and Exchange Commission slapped Theranos and Holmes with fraud charges, though she still touts her device as having improved accuracy and importance.

Pub Date: May 21, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5247-3165-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | BUSINESS | ENTREPRENUERSHP | GENERAL BUSINESS

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GOOD ECONOMICS FOR HARD TIMES

by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.

It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty , 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.

Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0

Page Count: 432

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019

GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL BUSINESS | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | BUSINESS | PUBLIC POLICY | ISSUES & CONTROVERSIES | ECONOMICS

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SEEN & HEARD

THE RIGHT STUFF

by Tom Wolfe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 24, 1979

Yes: it's high time for a de-romanticized, de-mythified, close-up retelling of the U.S. Space Program's launching—the inside story of those first seven astronauts. But no: jazzy, jivey, exclamation-pointed, italicized Tom Wolfe "Mr. Overkill" hasn't really got the fight stuff for the job. Admittedly, he covers all the ground. He begins with the competitive, macho world of test pilots from which the astronauts came (thus being grossly overqualified to just sit in a controlled capsule); he follows the choosing of the Seven, the preparations for space flight, the flights themselves, the feelings of the wives; and he presents the breathless press coverage, the sudden celebrity, the glorification. He even throws in some of the technology. But instead of replacing the heroic standard version with the ring of truth, Wolfe merely offers an alternative myth: a surreal, satiric, often cartoony Wolfe-arama that, especially since there isn't a bit of documentation along the way, has one constantly wondering if anything really happened the way Wolfe tells it. His astronauts (referred to as "the brethren" or "The True Brothers") are obsessed with having the "right stuff" that certain blend of guts and smarts that spells pilot success. The Press is a ravenous fool, always referred to as "the eternal Victorian Gent": when Walter Cronkite's voice breaks while reporting a possible astronaut death, "There was the Press the Genteel Gent, coming up with the appropriate emotion. . . live. . . with no prompting whatsoever!" And, most off-puttingly, Wolfe presumes to enter the minds of one and all: he's with near-drowing Gus Grissom ("Cox. . . That face up there!—it's Cox. . . Cox knew how to get people out of here! . . . Cox! . . ."); he's with Betty Grissom angry about not staying at Holiday Inn ("Now. . . they truly owed her"); and, in a crude hatchet-job, he's with John Glenn furious at Al Shepard's being chosen for the first flight, pontificating to the others about their licentious behavior, or holding onto his self-image during his flight ("Oh, yes! I've been here before! And I am immune! I don't get into corners I can't get out of! . . . The Presbyterian Pilot was not about to foul up. His pipeline to dear Lord could not be clearer"). Certainly there's much here that Wolfe is quite right about, much that people will be interested in hearing: the P-R whitewash of Grissom's foul-up, the Life magazine excesses, the inter-astronaut tensions. And, for those who want to give Wolfe the benefit of the doubt throughout, there are emotional reconstructions that are juicily shrill. But most readers outside the slick urban Wolfe orbit will find credibility fatally undermined by the self-indulgent digressions, the stylistic excesses, and the broadly satiric, anti-All-American stance; and, though The Right Stuff has enough energy, sass, and dirt to attract an audience, it mostly suggests that until Wolfe can put his subject first and his preening writing-persona second, he probably won't be a convincing chronicler of anything much weightier than radical chic.

Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1979

ISBN: 0312427565

Page Count: 370

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1979

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

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The world is undergoing a massive energy transition right now, fueled by the development and deployment of new technologies.

Out for blood

The inside story of the Theranos scandal is almost too wild to believe.

I don’t read a lot of page turners. I often find myself unable to put a book down—but they’re not the kinds of books that would keep most people glued to their chairs. Still, I recently found myself reading a book so compelling that I couldn’t turn away.

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou details the rise and fall of Theranos. If you aren’t familiar with the Theranos story, here’s the short version: the company promised to quickly give you a complete picture of your health using only a small amount of blood. Elizabeth Holmes founded it when she was just 19 years old, and both she and Theranos quickly became the darlings of Silicon Valley. She gave massively popular TED talks and appeared on the covers of Forbes and Fortune .

By 2013, Theranos was valued at nearly $10 billion and even partnered with Walgreens to put their blood tests in stores around the country. The problem? Their technology never worked. It never came close to working. But Holmes was so good at selling her vision that she wasn’t stopped until after real patients were using the company’s “tests” to make decisions about their health. She and her former business partner are now facing potential jail time on fraud charges, and Theranos officially shut down in August.

The public didn’t know about Theranos’ deception until Carreyrou broke the story as a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. Because he was so integral to the company’s demise, Bad Blood offers a remarkable inside look.

Some of the details he shares are—for lack of a better word—insane. Holmes would invite prospective investors to the lab, so they could get their blood tested on a Theranos machine. The device had been programmed to show a really slow progress bar instead of an error message. When results didn’t come back right away, Holmes sent the investors home and promised to follow up with results.

As soon as they left, an employee would remove the blood sample from the device and transfer it to a commercial blood analyzer. Her investors got their blood tested by the same machines available in any lab in the country, and they had no idea.

There’s a lot Silicon Valley can learn from the Theranos mess. To start, a company needs relevant experts on its board of directors. The Theranos board had some heavy hitters—including several former Cabinet secretaries and senators—but for most of the company’s existence, none of them had any expertise in diagnostics. If they had, they might have noticed the red flags a lot sooner.

Health technology requires a different approach than other kinds of technology, because human lives are on the line. Carreyrou writes a lot about how Holmes idolized Steve Jobs and his unwillingness to compromise on his vision. That approach is okay for consumer electronics—if a new phone doesn’t work as promised, no one gets hurt—but it’s irresponsible for a health company. Holmes pushed a vision of what Theranos could be, not what it actually was, and people suffered as a result.

“'Bad Blood' is a cautionary tale about the virtues of celebrity.”

Bad Blood is also a cautionary tale about the virtues of celebrity. On the surface, Holmes was everything Silicon Valley loves in a CEO: charismatic and convincing with a memorable personal story made for magazine profiles. There’s nothing wrong with that on its own. A rock star CEO can be a huge boon for a startup. But you can’t let fame become the most important thing.

Theranos is the worst-case scenario of what happens when a CEO prioritizes personal legacy above all else—but I hope that people don’t use it as an excuse to write off the next young woman with a big idea. I also don’t want Bad Blood to scare people away from next-gen diagnostics. Theranos went to extraordinary lengths to get around quality standards. The industry is highly regulated, and new diagnostics undergo rigorous testing.

Bad Blood tackles some serious ethical questions, but it is ultimately a thriller with a tragic ending. It’s a fun read full of bizarre details that will make you gasp out loud. The story almost feels too ridiculous to be real at points (no wonder Hollywood is already planning to turn it into a movie ). I think it’s the perfect book to read by the fire this winter.

Hannah Ritchie’s Not the End of the World is an essential antidote to environmental doomsday-ism.

The Song of the Cell proves that Siddhartha Mukherjee is one of the best science writers working today.

Vaclav Smil has written “a brief history of hype and failure."

Some favorites from 2023, including a new playlist.

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Bad blood: secrets and lies in a silicon valley startup by John Carreyrou: Book Review

• Book Review
• Published: 30 May 2020
• Volume 75 , pages 89–92, ( 2021 )

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• Jessica Wheeler 1  

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Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup J. Carreyrou. New York: Knopf (2018) 299 pp. $27.95 ISBN 9781524731656.

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Wheeler, J. Bad blood: secrets and lies in a silicon valley startup by John Carreyrou: Book Review. Crime Law Soc Change 75 , 89–92 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-020-09906-1

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Bad Blood (Carreyrou)

Bad Blood:   Secets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup John Carreyrou, 2020 Knopf Doubleday 368 pp. ISBN-13: 9780525431992  Summary In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the next Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup "unicorn" promised to revolutionize the medical industry with its breakthrough device, which performed the whole range of laboratory tests from a single drop of blood . Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes’s worth at an estimated $4.5 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn’t work. Erroneous results put patients in danger, leading to misdiagnoses and unnecessary treatments. All the while, Holmes and her partner, Sunny Balwani, worked to silence anyone who voiced misgivings—from journalists to their own employees. Rigorously reported and fearlessly written, Bad Blood is a gripping story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron—a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley. ( From the publisher .)

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Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup Kindle Edition

• Print length 353 pages
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• Publication date May 21, 2018
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John carreyrou.

John Carreyrou is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and a nonfiction author. His first book, "Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup," chronicles Silicon Valley's biggest fraud. Please direct any speaking queries to [email protected]

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Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

by John Carreyrou

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Book summary.

The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos, the multibillion-dollar biotech startup, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end, despite pressure from its charismatic CEO and threats by her lawyers.

In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup "unicorn" promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes's worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn't work. A riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley.

November 17, 2006 Tim Kemp had good news for his team. The former IBM executive was in charge of bioinformatics at Theranos, a startup with a cutting-edge blood-testing system. The company had just completed its first big live demonstration for a pharmaceutical company. Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos’s twenty-two-year-old founder, had flown to Switzerland and shown off the system’s capabilities to executives at Novartis, the European drug giant. “Elizabeth called me this morning,” Kemp wrote in an email to his fifteen-person team. “She expressed her thanks and said that, ‘it was perfect!’ She specifically asked me to thank you and let you all know her appreciation. She additionally mentioned that Novartis was so impressed that they have asked for a proposal and have expressed interest in a financial arrangement for a project. We did what we came to do!” This was a pivotal moment for Theranos. The three-year-old startup had progressed ...

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Carreyrou's work has won many accolades; his Wall Street Journal articles on Theranos won the George Polk Award for Financial Reporting, and Bad Blood was awarded the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award. It also appeared on many "best of" lists for 2018. My vote can be added; I certainly found it to be one of the finest non-fiction accounts I've read, and I highly recommend it to those interested in cautionary tales about the business world or great non-fiction reads in general... continued

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