Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou, Knopf, 2018.
Well! Recently on the Happier podcast Liz mentioned that she had just read a fascinating book and she was buttonholing everyone she knows and insisting that they read it too. It sounded so good that I figured maybe I should take a look, especially since Liz is in the midst of producing a new TV series and barely has time to breathe. If she read it, well, it must be worth a look, I thought. My new month’s Audible credit was in place, so I decided to go ahead and use that. Wow. I was absolutely entranced and stayed so to the very end. The audiobook is voiced by a great reader, by the way. (Not the author, though. I always really like it when an author does read his or her own work; I’ve especially enjoyed Rabia Chaudry’s reading of Adnan’s Story: The Search for Truth and Justice After Serial, Jonah Goldberg’s reading of Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy, and Mona Charen’s reading of Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense. But not all authors have the time or the inclination to do their own reading. Some professional readers are rather irritating, I’ve found, but this guy, someone named Will Damron, is never intrusive and has a great sense of pacing. He’s actually won awards for his audio performances.)
I’m not going to try to summarize the book’s story as a whole because I want you to enjoy it for yourself. I will just say that it concerns a young woman, Elizabeth Holmes, and her claim that she had developed the technology to test blood for hundreds of different conditions or diseases from just a few drops, thus sparing patients from having to go to a doctor’s office to have blood drawn. Her company, Theranos, was at one point valued at $9 billion. Then it all fell apart. That’s the very, very short version. But here are some key issues that are implicit in this story of skulduggery:
- Why are humans so prone to believe someone who seems confident, even when that person’s claims are, literally, incredible? (Holmes had such luminaries as George Schultz and James Mattis on her board of directors.)
- What’s going on in the mind of the con man or woman? How does the con start? How does the con artist fool himself or herself, or is that indeed what’s going on?
- Why don’t we listen to the Cassandras who try to warn us? (Well, that one is pretty easy to answer. We just don’t want to admit that we’re wrong, and we don’t want to deal with the problem. Maybe it’s not a problem after all, after all. Listen to this great episode of the “Hidden Brain” podcast to hear all about how discouraging it is to be a Cassandra. Don’t know who she is? Then listen to the podcast.)
I promise you that, if nothing else, this book will make you a better-informed patient the next time you have a blood test. One little tidbit that I learned, sort of a throwaway: why does the doctor’s office insist on drawing blood out of a vein rather than just doing a finger stick? (They’ll use that smaller sample for something very simple such as a glucose reading, but anything more complicated than that requires the dreaded needle.) Why? Something I’d never thought of and which makes perfect sense: the venous blood isn’t contaminated by skin and other tissue cells, but the Finger Stick blood probably is, since you’re piercing the surface. Inevitably some non-blood cells get into the sample, possibly blurring the result. So interesting!
Well, I hope you read this or Listen to it. Carreyrou (and isn’t that a great name?) has done a phenomenal job of piecing together hundreds of interviews; sometimes you wonder a little how his interviewees could remember so many details, even down to the color and style of a sofa in a meeting room. But he seems to be the kind of reporter who’d get two sources even for that!
The biggest takeaway: always ask questions, even if you’re afraid you’ll look foolish, and then be willing to be a whistleblower if need be. Oh man! I’m so very bad at doing that. This book has helped put just a little bit of steel in my own spine. (Not that the medical community has actually come up with a way to do that; you have to do it yourself, I’m afraid.) Read it and see what you think!
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