Elizabeth Holmes’s Weird Science Finds a New Captive Audience

A single drop of blood, Elizabeth Holmes once promised, could reveal hundreds of diseases. The promise was false. Theranos is gone, and its founder is serving a federal sentence in Texas.So, why is America lining up to watch her again, and what did she leave behind for medicine? “You Can See Everything,” an A24 film about Elizabeth Holmes directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, has grossed $45 million in ten days, a remarkably high sum for a documentary. The picture follows Ms. Holmes, her partner, Billy Evans, and their two young children through her final 34 days before prison.For those who work in medicine, the renewed fascination says more about the pitch than the person. “It is her shtick on testing breakthroughs. She is the Bernie Madoff of biotech,” the professor emeritus and past head of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, Arthur Caplan, tells the Sun.Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder, the directors of ‘You Can See Everything,’ attend the film’s New York Film Festival premiere at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center on September 30, 2026 in New York City. Via Cindy Ord/Getty ImagesA Drop of Blood and a Decade of DeceptionAt its peak, Theranos was valued at $9 billion on the strength of a single claim: That its Edison machine, small enough to sit on a kitchen counter, could run dozens of tests from a finger prick. It couldn’t. The company did much of its testing on commercial lab equipment bought from other manufacturers. On the witness stand in 2021, Ms. Holmes admitted she added the logos of Pfizer and Schering-Plough to reports praising the technology without either company’s approval.The unraveling began in October 2015, when a Wall Street Journal reporter published the first of a series of stories showing that Edison could not do what Theranos claimed it could. Two former lab employees, Tyler Shultz and Erika Cheung, had already taken their concerns to regulators. Federal inspectors who visited the company’s Newark, California, lab soon afterward found problems serious enough to put patients at risk. In 2016, Theranos voided two years of Edison test results and sent tens of thousands of corrected reports to doctors and patients. Arizona’s attorney general at the time, Mark Brnovich, reached a deal with Theranos in 2017 that sent $4.65 million in refunds to more than 175,000 Arizonans who had paid for its blood tests. The average check was about $61. Walgreens, which had opened Theranos testing sites inside its pharmacies, paid $44 million in 2023 to settle a class action by customers in Arizona and California. Under that deal, customers got back double what they paid for their tests, plus $10.At trial, jurors found her guilty in January 2022 on four counts of defrauding investors, yet acquitted her on every count involving patients. A laboratory scientist who once served on the company’s advisory board says that the verdict should not be overlooked.“Incorrect lab tests may mislead medical providers, but themselves cannot cause death, unlike a faulty medical device,” the chief of clinical chemistry and toxicology at San Francisco General Hospital, Alan Wu, tells the Sun.Mr. Wu sat on Theranos’s scientific and medical advisory board. He believes Ms. Holmes was at her best after the lab closed and her business partner, and former lover, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, was gone. He sees a similar dynamic with Mr. Evans in the film. “It is my belief that she was unnecessarily punished for misleading her investors, which occurs here regularly in Silicon Valley,” Mr. Wu underscores.Elizabeth Holmes and her boyfriend Billy Evans, leaves a hearing at the Robert E. Peckham U.S. Courthouse on March 17, 2023 in San Jose, California. Via Philip Pacheco/Getty ImagesThe Fallout for Diagnostics and BiotechIn any case, the collapse rippled well beyond one company. “The scandal caused investors to take a pause, resulting in a reduction in innovation for diagnostics,” Mr. Wu explains. “The industry has recovered, as witnessed by the increasing attendance at the last few ADLM annual meetings.” He sees no such reckoning among those who police labs. His point goes to a gap that allowed Theranos to reach patients in the first place. Most of its tests were “lab-developed,” meaning they were designed and run inside a single laboratory, and the Food and Drug Administration had long declined to review such tests before they reached the market.That left the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which enforces the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments, to inspect how the lab ran, rather than whether the technology worked.Both agencies eventually caught up. In 2015, the FDA found that Theranos had shipped its tiny “nanotainer” blood-collection tube as an uncleared medical device. In July 2016, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services revoked the certificate for the company’s Newark, California, lab and barred Ms. Holmes from operating a lab for two years.In May 2024, the FDA tried to change that with a rule treating lab-developed tests as medical devices that would need its approval. The American Clinical Laboratory Association and other lab groups sued. In March 2025, a federal judge in the Eastern District of Texas ruled the agency had overstepped its authority and vacated the rule. The FDA did not appeal and formally withdrew the rule in September 2025. That means tests designed and run inside a single lab, as most of Theranos’s were, can still reach patients without FDA review.For one emergency room doctor who also works in the biotech space, the bigger lesson is how often the same story repeats. “This happens every three to five years,” an emergency medicine physician based in Tennessee, Matt Tipton, tells the Sun.He recalls a late 1990s startup that claimed to have achieved cold fusion while guarding its results as proprietary. Investors, he says, keep chasing outsized returns. “It’s like a lottery ticket,” Dr. Tipton continues. “I think it’s going to make investors more skeptical, but I think that’s a good thing.”Today, when a new medical invention sounds close to perfection, many people think of Theranos. “Whenever too-good-to-be-true tech appears in the market, the first thing many think is — remember Theranos,” a professor in the Faculty of Law and School of Public Health at the University of Alberta, Timothy Caulfield, tells the Sun.Yet Mr. Caulfield doubts the caution stuck with the public. “While I think Theranos made a dent in public trust, I don’t think it has lasted,” he continues. “There is so much hype in health space,” he added, pointing to a booming longevity industry selling largely unproven testing and monitoring.Mr. Wu agrees that patients moved on. “Direct to consumer has exploded, but largely due to the COVID pandemic,” he says.In other words, people now routinely order their own blood work and use at-home tests without going through a doctor. That habit took hold during the pandemic, when home COVID tests became part of everyday life.Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes in ‘The Dropout.’ HuluA New Venture Under the Same ShadowMr. Evans never worked at Theranos and isn’t legally married to Ms. Holmes. The two met in 2017, after the Journal’s exposé and while she was under federal investigation.That skepticism is now, to a large degree, trained on Mr. Evans, the San Diego hotel heir who met Ms. Holmes in 2017 as Theranos was unraveling and is the father of her two children. He had no role at Theranos but now leads Haemanthus as chief executive.The startup says its laser-based device can analyze blood, saliva and urine to detect cancer and infections, beginning with pets. It has sought more than $50 million, and a photo of its prototype closely resembles the Theranos machine. Reports that Ms. Holmes has been advising her partner from prison have been denied by Haemanthus with the company insisting Ms. Holmes has “zero involvement.” She is barred from federal health programs for 90 years.“They [Haemanthus] will require the usual scientific clinical trials, engagement with key opinion leaders, peer-reviewed publications, etc., none of which have happened,” Mr. Wu says. Others agree the burden of proof sits squarely with the company’s founder. “I think it’s on him to prove what he says,” Dr. Tipton says of Mr. Evans. In the documentary, Mr. Evans calls Haemanthus “Theranos 2.0,” a label he’s since downplayed.Dr. Tipton, however, draws a firm line between ambition and fraud. “It’s not illegal for me to have a good idea and get people to invest,” he continues. “But if I knowingly misrepresent that idea to get you to invest, lie about it, and falsify data, that’s different.” Mr. Caplan, however, is less charitable about the venture. “Would not trust anything touted by him or her,” he stresses.Whether Ms. Holmes herself can return to medicine is no longer a distant question. She is slated to move to a Texas halfway house next August, with an official release date of February 22, 2030, and has said from prison that she keeps writing patents in pursuit of affordable health care. Yet her 90-year exclusion from federal health programs puts any hospital, lab, or company that bills Medicare or Medicaid at risk of federal penalties for employing her, and she owes $452 million in restitution. That leaves her free to file patents or advise private ventures, but locked out of most mainstream American medicine. Her reputation may prove the harder barrier, and some experts worry the Oscar-buzzed film may soften a hard lesson. “She is clearly a fraud,” Mr. Caulfield says. “She exploited people. She hurt science. She is not some misunderstood maverick who was just a bit too enthusiastic.”The lesson, he says, is patience. “Always, always, always wait for a good body of evidence that includes multiple studies using robust methods,” Mr. Caulfield adds. “Also important to consider: Will this actually have an impact on health outcomes? Even if it works, more data is not always better.”

Elizabeth Holmes’s Weird Science Finds a New Captive Audience

Elizabeth Holmes’s Weird Science Finds a New Captive Audience

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