By David Craig

Published: Wednesday, 02 March 2022 at 12:00 am

---

The implosion of health technology company Theranos and the subsequent fraud conviction of its former CEO Elizabeth Holmes is one of the most shocking stories to ever come out of Silicon Valley (and that’s saying something). Following in the footsteps of an ABC News podcast and an HBO documentary comes The Dropout on Disney Plus, which dramatises the unbelievable tale and places Oscar nominee Amanda Seyfried in the central role.

The saga begins in 2002 when Holmes began a chemical engineering degree at California’s prestigious Stanford University, where she soon began dreaming up ideas for radical new inventions. The first was a patch that would attach to an individual’s skin and routinely scan the body for infections, automatically administering antibiotics whenever necessary. An interesting idea in theory but physically impossible to execute, Holmes was informed by Professor of Medicine Dr Phyllis Gardner, but she seemingly disregarded the academic’s expertise as an underestimation of her ability.

Holmes dropped out of Stanford before her sophomore year to focus on her new business Theranos, which would be based around a similarly ambitious and potentially revolutionary piece of technology. She used the remainder of her tuition money to fund research into a device that would require just a single drop of blood to perform dozens of health tests, including those that identify serious conditions such as cancer and diabetes.

Promising fast, accessible and affordable blood testing in a country with an infamously high cost of healthcare, it’s not surprising that her invention – the Edison – had so much interest from investors. Meanwhile, the powerful narrative that Holmes spun alongside her pitch would soon have the world’s media fawning, with particular attention being paid to her public image as a young woman dominating in business, while sporting a similar style to that of the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

“We see a world in which no one ever has to say, ‘If only I’d known sooner’. A world in which no one ever has to say goodbye too soon,” said Holmes at TEDMED 2014. Unfortunately, this almost utopian promise was never anywhere close to becoming reality because the Edison machine simply didn’t work as advertised.

In 2015, the Wall Street Journal began a damning investigation into Theranos led by reporter John Carreyrou, which kick-started the chain of events that would bring the entire company down. A number of departed employees felt uncomfortable about Theranos practices, but most had been reluctant to come forward due to the threat of legal action from the $9 billion company. An unexpected whistleblower who became instrumental to Carreyrou’s report was ex-Theranos research engineer Tyler Shultz – grandson of American businessman and former Secretary of State George Shultz, who at the time was one of the strongest advocates of Holmes and her company.

Carreyrou’s initial report revealed that the supposedly revolutionary Edison was not capable of running as many tests as Theranos had claimed, with machines from rival companies being used instead in some cases. To make matters worse, the reliability of the proprietary technology was deemed questionable, with cases including a pregnant woman given results that wrongly indicated she had miscarried and another individual who received a false-positive HIV test. Fellow whistleblower Erika Cheung would later testify that the Edison results were roughly as accurate as tossing a coin.

The Wall Street Journal coverage led to an avalanche of questions and mounting pressure on Theranos to be more open about their closely guarded techniques. Shortly after, an investigation was opened by the regulatory Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and one year later 40 per cent of staff were laid off as the company restructured. In 2018, Holmes was ousted from the company and accepted a $500,000 fine, with criminal fraud charges following that same year.

The trial was delayed by Holmes’ pregnancy and the COVID-19 pandemic, but finally got underway in September 2021, with a jury finding her guilty on four counts of defrauding investors four months later. There was no verdict on three additional counts of wire fraud against investors, which were subsequently dismissed by the government, while Holmes was also found not guilty on four counts of defrauding patients. Still, it was a spectacular fall from grace for the woman that Forbes once described as the “youngest self-made female billionaire” on the planet.

Karl Mondon/MediaNews Group/Bay Area News via Getty Images

An extract from the SEC report reads: “Innovators who seek to revolutionise and disrupt an industry must tell investors the truth about what their technology can do today – not just what they hope it might do someday.”

The story of Theranos is not over yet. Holmes’ former business partner Sunny Balwani is also set to face criminal charges relating to his involvement in the company, with a trial intended to get underway in March 2022. He denies any wrongdoing. Outside of the workplace, Holmes and Balwani were also romantically involved for more than a decade, with their relationship being a major focus of drama series The Dropout – despite showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether admitting there is relatively little about it on public record.

“I think the storyline that is the most dramatised is the Sunny Balwani/Elizabeth Holmes relationship, just because we had almost no information about that,” she told RadioTimes.com and other press. “And so a lot of that is just me taking what I thought I knew and writing scenes, trying to make sense of it. It’s very much not a documentary. When I did go away from the facts, there was a reason and I tried to make it an informed decision. I think that if I had just been presenting the facts, then I wouldn’t be doing my job because you could just watch the documentary [HBO’s The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley].”

Disney Plus

Most of the characters featured in The Dropout are real people involved in the true story, although there is one notable exception in Theranos in-house lawyer Linda Tanner, played by Michaela Watkins. Speaking to RadioTimes.com, Watkins described her character as a fictionalised “amalgamation” of the legal team who worked for the tech start-up, but her performance still drew some inspiration from real footage taken from its now-closed headquarters.

“The way I sort of stepped into her body,” she began. “The moment that I said, ‘Okay, yes, I think I know who Linda Tanner is’… I watched the documentary and there was one woman, I don’t even think she was a lawyer, but it just hit me about what the culture at Theranos might have been. I think it was one of those things in the bullpen where everybody was celebrating the moment that the FDA approved one aspect of their testing capabilities. And they were playing Pump Up the Volume and I saw this woman just sort of dancing like she was part of the cult, like drinking the Kool-Aid. And I thought that’s who she is: she’s someone who is so excited to be on the winning team.”

The Dropout premieres on Disney Plus on Thursday 3rd March 2022. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide to see what’s on tonight.

The latest issue of Radio Times is on sale now – subscribe now to get each issue delivered to your door. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to the Radio Times podcast with Jane Garvey. 

---