Theranos exposed

2015NotableContested

Wall Street Journal reporting shows that blood-testing startup Theranos, once valued at $9 billion, ran most tests on conventional machines. Its founder is later convicted of defrauding investors.

Longest chain: The Big Bang → First stars ignite → Supernovae seed heavy elements → The Sun forms → Earth forms → First oceans → First life → Photosynthesis evolves → Great Oxidation Event → Complex cells (eukaryotes) → Multicellular life → First animals → Cambrian Explosion → First vertebrates → Jawed fish → Fish walk onto land → The amniotic egg → The Great Dying → Dinosaurs appear → Asteroid ends the dinosaurs → Early primates → Apes split from monkeys → Human line splits from chimpanzees → Walking upright → First stone tools → Genus Homo appears → Homo erectus → Control of fire → Habitual fire and cooking → Homo sapiens appears → Complex language → Natufian villages → Oldest known bread → Agriculture begins → Irrigation → Uruk and the first cities → Cylinder seals → Writing (cuneiform) → Babylonian mathematics → Babylonian astronomical diaries → Thales and natural philosophy → Trial and death of Socrates → Plato's Academy → Aristotle's Lyceum → Alexander's conquests → Death of Alexander and the Hellenistic kingdoms → Seleucid Empire founded → Parthian Empire founded → Sasanian Empire → Birth of Muhammad → Muhammad's first revelations → The Hijra → Conquest of Mecca → Death of Muhammad and the Rashidun caliphate → Arab conquests → Abbasid Caliphate → Battle of Talas → Paper reaches the Islamic world → House of Wisdom → Ibn al-Haytham's Book of Optics → Bacon's Novum Organum → Royal Society → Papin's steam digester → Newcomen steam engine → Watt's steam engine → Thermodynamics → Conservation of energy → Kinetic theory of gases → Boltzmann's statistical entropy → Quantum hypothesis → Bohr model of the atom → Quantum mechanics → Transistor → Integrated circuit → ARPANET → TCP/IP → World Wide Web → Amazon and e-commerce → Dot-com crash → Theranos exposed

Contested history

Consensus: Theranos's device could run only a limited set of tests and was less reliable than claimed; founder Elizabeth Holmes was convicted in 2022 of defrauding investors.

The founder knowingly misled investorsEstablished

A jury convicted her of conspiracy and three counts of wire fraud involving investors.

She also defrauded patientsDebated

The jury acquitted her on the patient counts, although regulators found the lab's results put patients at risk.

The company was a victim of the press and competitorsUnsupported

Federal lab inspectors found serious deficiencies in 2016, independent of the reporting.