Bad Blood
by John Carreyrou
An investigative non-fiction book by John Carreyrou, a
writer for the Wall Street Journal, based on a tip he received about the company Theranos, a bio-tech company that hopes
to revolutionize how blood screens are completed through a new technology. In his book, Bad Blood, Carreyrou discusses the work of an entrepreneur who can’t
be stopped. The owner of the company is
a young female, Elizabeth Holmes, who departed Stanford University after her
sophomore year of college to become the next Steve Jobs. Elizabeth is confident and driven with a
‘nothing will stop me’ attitude. Holmes
creates an all-star cast as her Board of Directors (George Schultz, Henry Kissinger,
and other US statesmen) to help raise millions of dollars to create the
mechanisms that will analyze blood without using needles and send results to
the covering physician and the patient.
Deals are signed for a delivery date to Safeway (Walgreen’s) and even
the military. Along the way, we see that
Holmes is a no-nonsense entrepreneur.
She runs a tight-ship but makes some unusual hiring decisions, namely her
secret-lover, Sunny Balwani, who she had met at a program in China as a
teenager. Balwani is the hatchet-man at
the company, and together they hire the best lawyers and instill a sense of fear
in ALL staff on their team. In the end,
a whistle-blower (Tyler Schultz, George’s grandson) reveals that they are using
bad data that could lead to patient death to stop the project from moving
forward. Amazing how power, greed, and
never-ending drive can make smart people lie and scam so many others. Great reporting. Probably a Dateline episode on NBC.
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