Elizabeth Holmes isn’t fooling anybody. Nicely, virtually anybody.
The convicted fraudster and founding father of the defunct medical start-up Theranos, is ready to start an 11-year sentence in federal jail. She acquired this punishment for deceptive traders about her lab-in-a-box expertise, which she claimed might run a whole lot of assessments on a couple of drops of blood. In actuality, when Theranos’s Edison machine wasn’t exploding, it was delivering unreliable outcomes to frightened patients. Holmes’s fall from grace—she was as soon as the youngest self-made woman billionaire—has been described over and over. However there’s nonetheless a bit extra blood left on this stone.
On Sunday, The New York Instances ran a profile of Holmes—which included the primary interview she’s given since 2016. The writer, Amy Chozick, means that she was charmed by Holmes, the devoted household girl. Chozick writes that Holmes is “mild and charismatic,” and “didn’t seem to be a hero or a villain. She appeared, like most individuals, someplace in between.” This flattering or a minimum of ambivalent tone was not nicely acquired. The Axios editor Sam Baker picked the article apart on Twitter. The emergency-medicine doctor Jeremy Faust referred to as it “credulous drivel.” Journalists and docs alike argued that the Instances had erred by serving to Holmes rehabilitate her picture.
When errors occur within the health-care system, docs attempt to hint their origin to damaged processes. Errors are addressed on the system—not particular person—degree: If a affected person receives an incorrect dose of a drugs, for example, the blame doesn’t essentially fall on the nurse who administered it or the doctor who prescribed it. Your complete drug-delivery course of, from pharmacy to bedside, is fastidiously inspected for unsafe practices. The media—and their content-delivery course of—have been going via the same postmortem over the Theranos debacle. Earlier than John Carreyrou broke the bad news concerning the firm at The Wall Road Journal, reporters had been glad to put in writing flattering profiles of Holmes with solely essentially the most rudimentary caveats. Even the Journal praised her earlier than it damned her. However the Instances’ newest go to to Holmesville means that this unsafe follow continues to be in place.
As a pathologist—a physician who makes a speciality of laboratory testing—I’ve been following the Theranos story because the starting. Holmes’s rise and fall is essentially the most glamorous scandal to hit my discipline in a while: Most are extra body-parts-in-the-back-of-a-pickup than celebrity-stuffed financial crimes. Simply final week, I used to be giving a grand-rounds speak about Theranos. Loopholes in laboratory regulation and widespread ignorance of how blood testing works had prompted medical professionals and the general public to fall for diagnostic scams, I informed the teachers in attendance. Towards the top of the lecture, I posed a query: Have the media realized their lesson after enabling Holmes’s charade?
A lot has modified about science reporting within the years since Holmes’s shame. I’ve watched the media’s dialogue of novel well being applied sciences develop extra nuanced and leery. Main information shops now exit of their approach to emphasize the precariousness of early examine findings. I’ve been getting extra calls from journalists who search a skeptical perspective on some new lab check or scientific discovering. However there are cracks within the media’s armor. The weakest element is the headline: You possibly can nonetheless declare all method of decisive breakthroughs, so long as you append “scientists discover” to the title. One other persistent downside is that medical controversies are reported out examine by examine. Again-and-forth articles about contested areas supply ready-made drama however little readability. (Masks assist forestall COVID; wait, they don’t work at all; by no means thoughts, now they do once more.) When docs consider the newest analysis, we acknowledge that some strategies are extra dependable than others. Knowledge comes from studying which ends up to disregard, and scientific consensus modifications slowly.
However journalists’ most cussed intuition—the one they share with Holmes—is to lean into a superb story. It’s the human facet of science that draws readers. Each technical advance have to be contextualized with a story of struggling or triumph. Holmes knew this in addition to anybody. She hardly dwelled on how her units labored—she couldn’t, as a result of they didn’t. As a substitute, she repeatedly informed the world about her worry of needles and of dropping family members to ailments which may have been caught earlier by a handy blood check. In fact reporters had been taken in. The subsequent entrepreneur to return alongside and inform a story like that will additionally get a sympathetic listening to within the press.
Holmes understood that nearly everybody—journalists, traders, sufferers, docs—will be swayed by a pat narrative. She’s nonetheless making an attempt to get forward by telling tales. In providing herself as much as the Instances as a reformed idealist and a beautiful mom, Holmes provides to a narrative that was began by her associate, Billy Evans. As a part of Holmes’s sentencing proceedings final fall, Evans wrote a multipage letter to the decide pleading for mercy, which was accompanied by quite a few photographs of Holmes posing with animals and kids. “She is gullible, overly trusting, and easily naive,” Evans wrote about one of many nice company hucksters of our period.
Journalists are nonetheless telling tales about her too, for higher or for worse. Holmes isn’t naive, nor are most readers of The New York Instances. Whereas final weekend’s “a hero or a villain” protection could also be mentioned to have betrayed the sufferers who had been harmed by her inaccurate blood assessments, and the reminiscence of a Theranos worker who died by suicide, it’s also simply one other entry within the expanded universe of Holmes-themed leisure. There are books and podcasts and feature-length documentaries. A TV miniseries about Holmes has a rating of 89 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. (“Addictively engrossing!” “Consistently entertaining!”) Certainly a few of those that now bemoan the Instances’ pleasant remedy have consumed this materials for less-than-academic causes.
The prosaic particulars of a convicted cheat’s home life aren’t actually information, however they’re attention-grabbing—as a result of the character of Elizabeth Holmes is attention-grabbing. So, too, are her continued efforts to spin a story of who she is. However with such well-trodden floor, the irony is constructed proper in. You realize that Holmes is a scammer. I do know it. On some degree, The New York Instances appears to realize it too; the article runs via her crimes and even quotes a good friend of Holmes’s who says she isn’t to be trusted. This isn’t character rehabilitation; it’s content material. We’re all ready to see what Liz will get as much as subsequent. Have the media realized their lesson? The true check will arrive when the following scientific scammer comes alongside, and the one after that—when their narrative continues to be intact, and their fraud hasn’t but been revealed. At that time, the system for stopping errors must do its work.
