The trial of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes is continuing in San Jose, California, and is receiving a lot of interest from the public and media. Ms Holmes is facing allegations of defrauding investors, and patients while CEO of the blood test start-up. She had been a rising star in Silicon Valley while promoting her invention of a machine that could conduct hundreds of laboratory tests from a single finger-prick of blood.
Holmes and the former Theranos president Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani have pleaded not guilty to charges. The trial has been running for a month, and was initially delayed by a juror potentially having been exposed to COVID-19. Testimony has already been given by an investor who put $85,000 into the company. Various lab workers from Theranos have already taken to the stand, saying that the company would ‘cherry-pick’ and manipulate data in order for the testing technology to appear more effective than it actually was.
“You’d have about the same luck flipping a coin as to whether your results were right or wrong,” a Theranos laboratory worker said. “It was concerning to see this degree of failure, this was not typical for a normal lab.”
Romantic poems and texts sent between Holmes and Balwani via text message were among the more salacious details revealed in the courtroom. Mr Balwani’s trial has not yet begun and is expected to commence on 18 January 2022. Proceedings into Ms Holmes’s case are expected to last through December 2021.
