Whistleblower Tyler Shultz spoke to students about his experience revealing the fraud behind Theranos, and how students can go on to be ethical actors in their future fields.
Shultz spoke as a part of the 20th annual Orin Ethics Symposium hosted by the Trulaske College of Business on Friday in Bush Auditorium. The auditorium was packed with roughly 300 interested viewers waiting to hear his story.
Theranos was a biotechnology company led by Elizabeth Holmes, who misled investors and the public about the idea of a small diagnostic machine that could reveal lab results from a single drop of blood, in theory.
Starting off his narrative, Shultz remarked lightheartedly that many red flags were right in front of him from the start.
"We had zero tests validated on the Theranos machine," Shultz said.
Working in a validation lab for Theranos, Shultz's job was to ensure the machine was functioning properly and giving out accurate test results, using a drop of blood. He arrived at the company just as the product began its rollout into Walgreens stores. However, he stated that despite this rollout, patients would have a vial, not a drop, of blood drawn. Furthermore, the blood would not be processed through the Theranos machine and was instead processed with expensive third-party medical devices already available.
Once the lab finally saw the company's own machine, it witnessed the beginning of the deception and fraud to come.
"I realized that there was an open secret that this...
You are reading the second issue of the Disinformation Monitor. It is published on a monthly basis and provides an overview of developments on the disinformation scenes on NATO’s eastern frontier....