One of the best investigative pieces I've ever read - and also, by the nature of the case, horrifying.
This book deals with Theranos, the famous Silicon Valley unicorn (a term coined for a tech startup which is valued at more than $1 billion) and its neurotic founder, Elizabeth Holmes and her equally neurotic boyfriend, Sunny Balwani.
Many people have heard that Theranos has had shady dealings (myself included), but how shady they were is revealed by this book - a treatise on Theranos spanning from its foundation till its demise (of which the author was the main catalyst). The amount of laws and regulations that the startup flouted is staggering in itself. But what is more staggering is that the premise on which Theranos was founded (that hundreds of blood tests could be performed on a tincture of blood nipped from your index finger) and which gave Holmes a personal valuation in excess of $5.5 billion, was all a hoax. How this hoax came about, who all were wittingly (and unwittingly) involved in the hoax, and how the hoax could have led about to hundreds of deaths, forms the basis of the investigative novel.
On reading this book, one can easily understand how Carreyrou has won the Pulitzer Prize twice - his treatment is precise and cutting, and very easy to decipher and absorb - even medical laymen like me will have a ton to draw from the book, as is the book's intention.
TL;DR - roller-coaster work spanning the rise and fall of a Silicon Valley startup that got too ambitious for its own good, and in sight of its goal, flouted everything there was to flout. A dense but fulfilling read. ( )

I read this book very slowly, this was mainly because Theranos had a habit of constantly firing people and I kept forgetting who each name referred to. The book flipped between timelines a little bit and there were a few times that I had trouble following. Other than that, this is an interesting book about a woman who wanted to be the next Jobs or Gates and ended up defrauding many influential Americans. I feel bad for anyone that received a false blood test on one of her devices.

As a side note: there is a trial set to happen in October 2020. I look forward to seeing what happens. ( )

I read this book very slowly, this was mainly because Theranos had a habit of constantly firing people and I kept forgetting who each name referred to. The book flipped between timelines a little bit and there were a few times that I had trouble following. Other than that, this is an interesting book about a woman who wanted to be the next Jobs or Gates and ended up defrauding many influential Americans. I feel bad for anyone that received a false blood test on one of her devices.

As a side note: there is a trial set to happen in October 2020. I look forward to seeing what happens. ( )

The Theranos story is so fascinating. Carreyrou paces the book evenly, slowly building his case. I borrowed this from a clinical chemist who plays (per him) a bit role in the story, appearing in a couple sentences within the book. When I returned his copy, the two of us sat in his office just marveling at how things progressed so far. Within my own little clinical chemistry domain, CLIA looms like a Greek god -- all-powerful and all-knowing. Should we accidentally make a typo in our data, CLIA will send bolts of lightning to destroy us. The idea that a lab somehow became CLIA-certified with such significant variance in their data even before the straight-out fraud is almost unbelievable.

In addition, this seems like any doctor in their right mind would know what to make of Theranos. My best friend who works with silicon valley startups asked me about it several years ago, when I was still in residency, and I told her that the problem with capillary draws was hemolysis (blood cells splitting) and that you could never get some accurate results do that - and that's baked in to the blood draw, before you even get to the machinery. Any doctor worth their salt knows this.

So this is an almost fantastical story about how someone by force of personality alone paraded out technology that everyone knew was impossible, and somehow, without ever really inventing anything became a billionaire running laboratory testing in clinical labs on patients. It's pretty serious and scary stuff.

While reading it, I couldn't help but be amazed by the number of smart, well-educated people who were at least temporarily a party to this, often bullied by fancy lawyers and nondisclosure agreements. I think there's a lot here about how much the assumptions of civil society are really what keep us in check more so than institutions like CLIA or CAP. Once someone starts operating in bad faith, it's pretty scary how far they can get. On the other hand, Theranos was pretty much brought down by Carreyrou assisted by a pair of early-twenty-somethings who felt they had to speak out. So I think there's also a lot here about the importance of protecting whistle-blowers and the media. ( )

Audiobook. ( )