Well, here’s two things that I hope will happen:
- Science journalists stop being such suckers for facile storylines. I mean, most of the Theranos coverage amounted to “Brilliant college dropout disrupts trillion-dollar industry with this one weird trick!”. They should aspire to writing stories better than the banner ads on their webpages.
- The whole notion of “disrupting” the healthcare industry gets tossed in the garbage where it belongs. No enterprise in history has done as much as science-based healthcare to transform human existence for the better. Constant improvement – especially with regard to equity and access – is essential. But radical change, disruption? The chance that they lead to good outcomes is zero. Human lives are not industry sectors to be experimented on. The first step in disruption – introduce an inferior product at a lower price – is not acceptable.
So far as I can tell, Holmes hurt no one other than her investors. None of them invested money they could not afford to lose, so no tears need be shed. And if this sorry episode makes us a little more skeptical of the next round of healthcare hype,then Holmes may have done us all a big favor.