What I saw was a lot of tech people and VCs cautioning against a rush to judgment. Which is totally reasonable. I for one will leave this up to the regulators to figure out. The people who invested in the company will lose (some/most/all) of their money. No need for us to get whipped up into outrage.
I'm not outraged by Theranos, but I do feel that stuff like this makes it all the harder for legitimate science to get investment, by "raising the bar" on the number of stupid, oversimplified, breathless claims you need to make to get noticed.
Real science is too messy to be able to compete with a press release from a sufficiently motivated huckster -- and investors love a huckster in lab coat.
Don't worry. Theranos failed even some of the simplest tests so how is that going to raise the bar at all? Work safety should not be a casual business gesture. It is as if you expect you raise money and you don't provide some insurance for your startup hires. No way. Anyone doing laboratory work should be careful with regulations. Wearing goggles and no smoking in the lab should be really basic. I don't expect anyone following the whole manual, but common sense yes. Simple tests, yes. Standard procedures should still be practiced.
Doesn't real science ... publish real papers? Or at least file patents. It's the secret sauce that's so suspcious. To a skeptical outsider, it whiffs of e-Cat.
Yeah, but investors don't often read papers...let alone have the expertise to know if they're any good. It's pretty common for investors to commit money based on good spin and social proof. Theranos has excelled at both.
Plenty of investors were straight up reaching for the conspiracy theory handbook. They did outright accuse the media of a smear campaign and suggested it was some greater corrupt conspiracy.
Silicon Valley has a very hard time accepting the possibility (nay, certainty) that there are some bad actors in our midst (even well-meaning bad actors). A very large portion of the scene seem to respond to accusation of malfeasance with hostility.
A certain amount of skepticism against claims of malfeasance, sure, but in Theranos' case there were a lot of comments not unlike Dave Morin's.
