Sunday, March 27, 2022

Book Review: Bad Blood (2018). John Carryrou.

An excellent investigative history of Theranos, the glittery $9 billion hi-tech health start-up led by Elizabeth Holmes, a beautiful and charismatic 19-year old Stanford drop-out who promised a revolution in blood testing, but instead led it to disaster and collapse through personal manipulation, brilliant but fraudulent marketing, secrecy and deceit over a 15-year period.  

 

The book and Carryou’s investigation, as well as some of the information contained in the book, appear in some of the current documentaries, podcasts and fictionalized versions of the Theranos story, including most recently the HBO documentary series The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, and the Hulu TV mini-series The Dropout. 

 

A fascinating and disturbing story of the high-tech start-up world and its pathologies, well researched and presented.  Recommended.

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