IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2019 - 10

Book Reviews
Karl D. Stephan

Secrets and Lies
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
By John Carreyrou. Knopf, 2018, 336 pages.

lizabeth Holmes must
have quite a realitydistortion field. That
phrase was originally
applied to the combination of charisma, persuasion,
and charm that Steve Jobs exerted
on his Apple coworkers, and reportedly derives from an old Star Trek
episode. Holmes, who dropped out
of Stanford in 2004 at the age of 20
to start a blood-testing-device company called Theranos, idolized Jobs.
She even took to wearing a Jobsstyle black turtleneck to complement her good looks and deep voice
(the last of which turned out to be
a carefully cultivated affectation).
And for several years afterward, as
Theranos acquired venture capital, bright employees, and eventually contracts with major enterprises
such as Safeway and Walgreens,
Holmes emulated her idol, making
the cover of Fortune in 2014, giving TED talks, and generally playing
the role of precocious Silicon Valley
entrepreneur to the hilt.
Holmes had never outgrown a
childhood needle phobia that made
the conventional blood-drawing process a nightmare for her. While still
at Stanford, she conceived the idea
of developing a system that would
require only a single pinprick's drop
of blood to do all the tests that
normally required several vials of

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2019.2934586
Date of publication: 30 August 2019

blood drawn by a phlebotomist. She
wanted blood testing to become so
simple and cheap that every local
pharmacy could do almost any kind
of test right there in the store with
only one drop of blood.
Holmes's idea of inventing a
cheap, small, fast, reliable blood-testing system to creatively destroy most
of the world's existing infrastructure
for blood tests ran into big problems
early on. But with her chutzpah, persuasiveness, and eventually with the
help of outright obfuscations and
lies, Holmes kept Theranos going
until a Wall Street Journal investigative reporter named John Carreyrou
responded to a lead by a health-care
blogger that something fishy was
going on. When Holmes found out
what Carreyrou was up to, she fired
fusillades of legal threats at him, but
Carreyrou kept going with a series of
articles that revealed the truth: Theranos was a house of cards built on
falsified data, unreliable not-readyfor-prime-time prototypes, and illusions. The house of cards collapsed
(Theranos went out of existence in
September 2018), and Holmes is
now facing criminal indictments.
And Carreyrou has written up the
whole story in Bad Blood.
The title brings to mind Truman
Capote's 1966 non-fiction crime
novel, In Cold Blood, and the comparison is apt. Capote's book about
the grisly murder of the Clutter family of Kansas was a suspenseful narrative that kept the reader wondering
IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

just how much worse things could
get, and Carreyrou does the same.
Few business histor y or ethics
books can be described as pageturners, but Carryrou earns that
accolade through near-exhaustive
research, careful selection of telling
details and quotes, and a sense for
the dramatic scene, of which there
are many.
Take for example the critical
Theranos board meeting held in
2006, only two years after Holmes
quit Stanford to found the firm. By
then, she had raised millions of dollars from family friends and SiliconValley networking, and had made
extravagant revenue predictions
that her four-member board of seasoned business men decided were
unreasonable, once they found out
what she was promising to pharmaceutical companies. After discussing among themselves, they decided
that it was time for Holmes to step
down as CEO and make way for
someone with more experience.
After all, even Steve Jobs got kicked
out of Apple for a while, and he survived. So they called her in to the
boardroom to tell her their decision.
In Carreyrou's words, "something
extraordinary happened." Holmes
brought her reality distortion field
along with her, and before two hours
were over, with a combination of
remorse, promises to behave better, and charm she had convinced
the board to keep her on as CEO.
Time and again, older men armed
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SEPTEMBER 2019

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2019

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