Throughout the beginning of The Dropout, the dramatised Disney+ series about the fraudulent health-tech entrepreneur, Elizabeth Holmes (played by Amanda Seyfried), we see her staring at a chunky iPod in her hand. Her vision, she promised people, was that her company was going to be the Apple of healthcare; not only disrupting it, but entirely revolutionising it.
In real life, back in 2004 when she was just 19, Holmes dropped out of Stanford University to make that vision a reality through her new technology. There was just one problem: it didn’t exist.
Holmes’s initial idea was to somehow engineer a skin patch that would not only be able to diagnose health issues, but be able to also dose any required medication as well. This was given an unequivocal “nope” from a professor at Stanford (“I don't think your idea is going to work”, she politely put it), and several other literal experts she contacted also agreed in the negative.
Unperturbed, Holmes continued, launching a company called Real-Time Cures - which later became Theranos - until she landed on the idea of a pin-prick blood test which could be examined for numerous health tests. Gone would be the days of invasive blood tests with needles and larger vials of blood, and, with a newer, easier process, it meant medical conditions could be detected earlier, giving people a better chance of survival with earlier treatment. Alongside democratising healthcare (a much-needed move in America, even now) she...
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