Can Elizabeth Holmes Save Theranos?

After several years of Holmes telling the largely unchallenged story of how Theranos intends to change the world, a blast of cold air came on Oct. 15, when the Wall Street Journal published the result of a five-month investigation by John Carreyrou. The piece reported that as of the end of 2014, Theranos wasn’t using its own products and technology to analyze most of the tests it was conducting for consumers. Former employees, the article further reported, claimed Theranos was cheating on routine proficiency tests, which help federal regulators determine if a particular lab is producing accurate results. The implication was that Theranos’s technology was largely a charade. A series of similarly critical articles followed. Bloomberg News reported that some Theranos partners that had signed deals with the company, including AmeriHealth Caritas and Intermountain Healthcare, hadn’t actually started using the technology yet. The bright-eyed woman the media had clambered over themselves to mythologize was now being picked apart.