You Can See Everything, Except Theranos’ Blood Tests: Scientific Perspectives on the Latest Elizabeth Holmes Documentary
Much to everyone’s surprise, notorious Silicon Valley founder Elizabeth Holmes is back in the public eye thanks to A24’s latest documentary, You Can See Everything.
Before she was seen on movie screens across America, Holmes dropped out of Stanford at 19 to found Theranos, a health technology company focused on improving blood tests. Eventually, Theranos raised over $700 million, resulting in a $9 billion valuation at the company's prime and Holmes’ title as the youngest female billionaire in 2014.
Its selling point? Theranos claimed to have invented a machine that could run two hundred and forty blood tests using only a few drops of blood.
Holmes and Theranos would have been a classic Silicon Valley success story, except for the fact that their revolutionary blood test machine never existed. Theranos’ Edison device could only run fifteen tests of the over two hundred promised. In fact, the majority of the blood tests the company performed were run on existing traditional machines manufactured by other companies.
In 2015, Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou first published information about discrepancies between Theranos’ claims and the actual capabilities of Edison, its blood testing system, from whistleblower Tyler Schulz, a research engineer at Theranos. Around the same time, former Theranos lab assistant Erika Cheung began reporting issues with Theranos’ blood testing procedures to the federal government.
These claims launched investigations into Holmes, eventually resulting in her conviction of four counts of fraud for deceiving her company’s investors in 2022. She was acquitted for four counts of patient-related fraud and was sentenced to eleven years in prison.
During the trials, Kate Queeney, a professor of chemistry at Smith College, began to take an interest in Holmes. “I was just so interested in how someone could commit such blatant scientific fraud without raising any questions,” Queeney said. “Companies that make a technological breakthrough don't give away their trade secrets, but they typically have something to say about what their approach is.”
For Queeney, the Theranos scandal reinforced how vital expertise is when it comes to making sound investment decisions. ”Most of the people defrauded were investors with no real scientific training,” she said.”I would be curious to know if the fact that the Theranos board was apparently clueless has changed the way investors and/or entrepreneurs think about the role of board oversight, but I'm not optimistic.”
Comedian Nathan Fielder and documentarian Lance Oppenheim entered the scene thirty-four days before Holmes was set to begin her prison sentence. Rather than centering the scientific concerns behind Theranos’ blood tests, Fielder urges the audience to consider who Elizabeth Holmes really is.
The documentary has warranted criticism from many. Self-proclaimed Theranos aficionado, Linda Holmes, believes that You Can See Everything’s portrayal of Elizabeth Holmes and the directors’ choice to focus on her ‘grayness’ over the hard facts of the Theranos case does a “disservice to the people who suffered real consequences from her actions.” Similarly, Theranos whistleblower Tyler Schulz took issue with how Fielder’s setup “introduce[s] doubt in the minds of the audience about whether Elizabeth actually lied about the capabilities of the Theranos technology.”
While acknowledging the criticism, Queeney offered a different perspective. “I'm inclined to take the film for what it is…I just encourage everyone interested in this to read (and watch) broadly, but I think Nathan Fielder's film is a very specific kind of work, and I just really enjoyed it in that context,” Queeney said.
Queeney hopes that the reignited interest about Holmes helps the public to understand the importance of acquiring expertise in a field before pursuing ‘big ideas,’ and highlighted a specific scene from the documentary that stood out to her. “Billy Evans [Holmes’ husband] is watching YouTube videos about science at 2x speed–he apparently thinks he's learning science, but we know he's not, in part because he makes a really funny (and very wrong) statement later in the film about how one aspect of their purported new technology [from Evans’ blood testing startup, Haemanthus] works.”
However, Queeney believes that it’s important to keep in mind the double standards surrounding the Theranos trial. “My husband keeps pointing out that Elon Musk has lied repeatedly about the capabilities of some of his products, and he is not in jail,” Queeney began. “The whole Theranos story is inextricably tied up with the role of women in science, in business, and just in US culture generally, and as horribly flawed as Elizabeth Holmes is, and as egregious as her actions were, I think we can't ignore the gendered aspect of this whole story.”
By Vimala Albert
