Blog 7: Bad Blood

This week I finished reading the book I chose for our book review assignment, Bad Blood by John Carreyrou. The topic of the book was the rise and fall of the start-up company Theranos and its founder Elizabeth Holmes. Reading this book was very interesting given the course topics we have been discussing. Although, many of the major case studies have been related to water crises there are similar ethical dilemmas in the public health sector that Theranos operated in.

One of the most surprising things that I found while reading was how many powerful celebrities and political figures were involved with Theranos. Through her networking Holmes was able to recruit the financial backing and support of individuals such as Oracle founder Larry Ellison, former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, Rupert Murdoch, former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, General James Mattis, and former director of the CDC William Foege amongst many others. The support and financial backing of these individuals (with funding funneled towards a strong legal team) made it difficult for former employees and those who were aware of the companies unethical behaviors to go public. These whistleblowers were targeted with cease and desist letters, followed by private investigators, threatened with lawsuits for all of their worth, and in some cases sued. 

After reading the book, the unethical practices of Theranos became quite clear but what really stood out was how the involvement of so many people of power was able to prolong the company's lies.

Comments

  1. John Q. PublicNovember 3, 2021 at 10:43 AM

    A key ingredient of a big lie. People who want to believe.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blog Post #2: The Botanist Who Defied Stalin

Whilst reading this article that discussed the life and contributions of botanist Nikolai Vavilov, I had several reactions. Vavilov and his team prioritized science at a time in their country where science merged with politics. Their views of science and botany were not in alignment with the politics taking over their country which lead to Vavilov himself being jailed. Furthermore, his team was left to protect the scientific contributions and seed repository. The repository was under attack from opposing political figures and starving citizens.  This article really challenged some of my views of scientific ethics. Vavilov and his team pledged their commitment to science over politics. This is similar to the challenges that scientists faced in other totalitarian regimes at the time. However, I find challenging that in a country where millions were starving, even several of the members themselves, they placed the upkeep seed repository above the well-being of the public. While ...
Read more

Blog 5: Boeing 737 Case Study

In this blog post, I will discuss background information related to the context I have selected for my final project. I will be exploring the Boeing 737 Max crashes and subsequent groundings which occurred between 2018 and 2020. This case is a current, real-world controversy that involves engineering, public policy, the environment, and members of the public.  In 2018 and 2019 the Boeing 737 Max passenger aircraft was involved in two major plane crashes which resulted in the death of 346 people. Following these crashes the aircraft was grounded from all travel across the world from March 2019 and December 2020. This 20-month grounding by the Federal Aviation Association (FAA) was the longest recorded for a U.S. airliner and cost Boeing $20 billion in direct costs and an estimated $60 in indirect losses (Isidore, 2020). While the plane was grounded, a series of investigations were conducted by the FAA, Congress, and multiple other government agencies. Reviews by engineering panels ...
Read more

Blog 6: The Young Professional's Survival Guide & Why Things Go Wrong

One of the chapter's that we read this week from the Young Professional's Survival Guide focused on the topic of "Why Things Go Wrong". Related to ethics in the workplace, there are common pitfalls one can avoid in order to try to keep things from going wrong. Oftentimes ethics can be a slippery slope and avoiding these pitfalls can help keep a professional on the "right" track. In the chapter, the authors introduced several dangers that lead professionals to cross the boundary into unethical actions. Some of these dangers included incrementalism, rationalization, and pressure from outside sources. I found several of the psychological experiments used as examples of dangers to be quite interesting and it lead me to consider the overlap of ethics in academic science and the workplace. The two experiments that were used as examples and that stood out to me in this study were Zimbardo's Stanford Prison experiment and Milligram's electric shock study. Th...
Read more