The saga of the medical testing company Theranos and its founder, Elizabeth Holmes, is a swirling one, packed with lies, greed, secret romance, literal blood, metaphorical blood, power, secrecy and money. And the Army. It’s a wild tale: Holmes was a 19-year-old Stanford student when she dropped out of school to launch Theranos, a company she said was developing a blood-testing device that could run hundreds of tests from just a finger-prick of blood rather than whole vials. The story of Theranos’s Silicon Valley rise and eventual total collapse — the company has dissolved, and Holmes was indicted on fraud charges — has lent itself to multiple retellings in various formats, including long-read articles, a meticulously researched book and a podcast, among others. Alex Gibney’s documentary “The Inventor: Out for Blood In Silicon Valley,” premiering Monday on HBO, is the latest account of the ostensible visionary who managed to deceive a lot of people (including two former secretaries of state).

Source: New York Times March 18, 2019 17:37 UTC