After a Covid-19-forced hiatus, the fraud trial of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes began hearing from witnesses in earnest on Tuesday (14 September). Among them was Erika Cheung, a former lab associate, who was one of the main whistleblowers about the unacceptable unreliability and scope of the company’s Edison blood-testing system. Her testimony and comments elsewhere speak beyond the case to another of its broadly important aspects: trust in new healthcare technology.
In a 2020 TEDxBerkeley talk, Cheung described why she joined the company in 2013 and quit just seven months later as a result of three ‘red flags’: an ongoing series of inaccurate Edison results across a number of controlled samples; the reporting of results from other approved testing hardware as results from Edison to regulators at the Food and Drug Administration; and COO Ramesh ‘Sunny’ Balwani’s refusal to act on her concerns when she raised them.
“So what does this signal to you...