Silicon Valley Scam of the Century: 'Blood Test for Cancer' Myth Busted, Female Steve Jobs Faces 20 Years in Prison

Elizabeth Holmes was once known as the "female Steve Jobs".

She attended Stanford University and dropped out halfway through to start her own business. She said she had an idea, as long as you take a drop of blood from the finger, put it into a test box as big as a credit card, in minutes, the results on the spot, can do more than 200 professional blood tests.

Driven by this entrepreneurial idea, in 2003, at the age of 19, she created a medical company called "Hilaros". Soon, Hilaros was booming, and investment was pouring in.

Within a decade, the company's valuation had risen to nearly $10 billion, making it a true unicorn. At the age of 30, Elizabeth Holmes was named one of Forbes' 400 richest women in the world.

On October 15, 2015, the Wall Street Journal revealed this amazing scam. It turns out that Hillarose has no innovative technology at all, the so-called blood test is a fraud, and the so-called "blood goddess" is actually a female liar.

As of recent, the allegations against Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the original blood-testing company Theranos, are about to go to trial.

The 37-year-old faces up to 20 years in prison if found guilty of 12 counts of fraud.

This amazing scam, even Bill Gates read it and exclaimed, "This story is even crazier than I imagined ......"

This is the book that @ Road Reading wants to share with you today.

This is the book that @ Road Reading wants to share with you today, Bad Blood.

1. The rich white girl who dropped out of school to start her own business

The centerpiece of the Silicon Valley scandal is the young founder of the company, the legendary "female Steve Jobs," Elizabeth Holmes.

Holmes comes from a distinguished family. Her grandfather's grandfather was the founder of Cincinnati Hospital and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, which is still remembered and celebrated today; her grandfather's grandmother came from the famous Fleischmann family in the US, with a strong background in politics and business; and her grandfather graduated from West Point and worked as an officer in the Pentagon.

This family is involved in areas spanning the U.S. business, health care, politics, and the military. A child born into such a family is born with the honor of their ancestors and lives with the fame of their forefathers. Then you think, what kind of education model she received when she was a child? Is not all day long by the parents will be nagging: you have to be progressive, to work hard, like the ancestors to become a man of the world. It is not like that?

So, in this kind of growing environment, Holmes little age, ambition is very big, the goal is very clear: I want to be a big boss, to make a lot of money. 10 years old, a relative teased her, girl, what do you want to do when you grow up ah? Little girl blurted out: "I want to become a billionaire!"

The relative asked her again: "Why not be the president?" The little girl tensed her little face and said with a serious face, "No, if I have a billion dollars, the president will come to marry me!" I guess, who's going to say that, adults at most a little fun, fun, right, doll words, who will take it seriously?

But Holmes wasn't just saying that, and as it turns out, her life path since then has really been a wild ride in that direction. Of course, the girl's level of intelligence and hard work is worthy of her ambition.

At the age of seven, he designed a time machine, and his laptop was filled with detailed engineering drawings; as a teenager, he was admitted to a major high school, where he received straight A's. In 2002, he was awarded a Presidential Scholarship to attend Stanford University, where he studied chemical engineering, and he was awarded a Presidential Scholarship to attend Stanford University. Stanford University Oh, Presidential Scholarship Oh, with such ability, what kind of life dream can not go after? The first thing you need to do is to get your hands dirty.

But who would have thought that after just one semester of college life, Holmes would not be able to sit still, and she would have to drop out of school to make money.

The story goes back to the SARS epidemic that swept the world in the spring of 2003, with Asia being the worst affected. That summer, Holmes applied for an internship at the Genome Institute of Singapore, where she spent the summer helping to test patient samples.

In the process, she was surprised to find that in the 21st century, samples were still being collected by the traditional means of drawing blood from syringes and swabbing secretions from the previous century. This is too inefficient and technologically backward, isn't it? Technology is advancing by leaps and bounds, so how come we haven't kept up with it at all?

Holmes was so inspired by her internship that she felt there was a lot of room for improvement in medical diagnostics. Further, she thought that if she could realize a technological innovation in this field, it would be a super business blueprint. The more she thought about it, the stronger her desire to make a lot of money became.

And so, at 19, Holmes decided to give up her studies and start her own company, Theranos, a combination of the words therapy and diagnosis.

2. Theranos: The Rising Star of Silicon Valley

In the last few years, the Internet has become a very popular place for startups, and when you walk into a cafe, you'll see a table here saying "I have an idea", and a table there saying "I've already closed my Series A round. "The most important thing about starting a business is that it's a good idea to have a good idea. What is the most important thing in starting a business? It's not the idea, it's finding the money. It's not the idea, it's finding the money.

When Holmes talked to investors about her idea, many of them listened with glazed eyes.

Her idea was this: to develop a high-tech diagnostic patch that would painlessly collect blood through a micro-needle, analyze it by a microchip sensing system in the patch, and determine how much of the drug should be released, and the results of that analysis would be transmitted to the patient's doctor. And, as she envisions it, the device cross-utilizes nanotechnology and semiconductor technology, which is quite cutting-edge and innovative.

In addition, when Holmes spoke to investors about her vision, the live speech was charismatic and infectious, and investors took a look and nodded their heads.

In less than a year, by the end of 2004, Holmes had raised $6 million in angel funding. Even her college mentor, Channing Robertson, found the idea so promising that he volunteered to join the company's board of directors as a consultant, and Sharnett Roy, a PhD student in the same lab as her, joined the team, and even though he thought his sister's idea wasn't very realistic, he was still impressed by her passion and optimism, and became the company's first employee.

In fact, his skepticism was not unreasonable. Holmes envisioned a patch that combined therapy, diagnostics, and intelligent control, which was theoretically perfect, but when analyzed a little more, it revealed that there were so many technical challenges that it would not be possible to produce a finished product in just a few years.

Now, Holmes had to accept the reality that the patch was not going to work. So she decided to simplify the product, keeping only the core function of diagnostics, and develop a lightweight blood test for home use.

Holmes envisioned the construction and principle of this instrument as follows: the instrument is divided into two parts, a smaller test box and a larger reader. When you use it, you only need to put the blood into the test box, and then put the test box into the reader, and then the next job will be handed over to the machine.

Inside the cassette, there are a number of microtubules, and the reader generates pressure to flow the blood through the microtubules, separating out the plasma, which then goes into small holes at the very end. These holes contain different antibodies that react chemically with different components of the plasma and generate signals. Finally, these signals are uploaded to a server, where they are calculated and analyzed, and the results are displayed on the reader's screen.

The test combines biochemistry and microfluidics.