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Elizabeth Holmes and the Dangers of White Feminism
Elizabeth Holmes is a grifter. I’m not sure why that’s so hard for some people to say. She’s not some mysterious, Sphinx-like creature who contains multitudes. She’s a classic, old school con artist who went back to the medical roots of selling snake oil. I was a molecular biology major in college and seriously considered becoming a scientist. (I ended up going to law school.) It’s a tough haul as an undergrad. It’s even tougher as a grad student and much tougher as a researcher. It takes a huge amount of work from a range of diligent, extensively trained, sometimes generationally brilliant people to achieve the kind of medical breakthrough Holmes was promising to deliver at her company, Theranos: tests for a multitude of medical conditions using the small amount of blood provided by a finger-prick. Everyone should have been skeptical that a 19 year-old college dropout modelling herself after billionaire tech founders was going to revolutionize medical technology. In hindsight, her subdued, Steve Jobsian, black turtlenecks were blaring sirens.
Medical research is an ocean apart from software and app development. Both require talented, skilled workers, but it’s almost impossible to become proficient at the former without formal training at a university. The equipment and materials needed are too expensive. Supervised research over extended periods of time…
