It’s like, any female CEO with any tech-adjacent thing is constantly being questioned—by the way, are you like this other fraud?
This really sounds like she is admitting that this is fraud, and that she doesn’t like being compared to other fraud.
Yeah, she didn’t really address fraud comparisons. Went straight to sexism. Both can be true, and if you are a CEO of a medical company you should be ready to prove your shit works.
If I (man) was being interviewed and the interviewer randomly said “hey, I read in the news a little while ago that a man committed fraud, and well, you’re a man too. Are you a fraud?”, I also wouldn’t dignify it with a response.
If the interviewer had said “This seems like a service a lot of people would want to partake in - how has the efficacy of this procedure has been confirmed, how can we verify that it works?”, he’d have got an answer.
Saying “hey, these people with no link to you other than your genitals are frauds, and it makes me feel like you could be, so are you?” doesn’t deserve to be treated like a question asked in good faith, because it isn’t.
E: spelling
If they were committing nearly identical fraud it would be a good comparison.
Did you read what she was claiming it could do with a minuscule sample and a fancy algorithm? That is exactly the same claim as Theranos.
Wtf? No. What relevance does theranos have to this company? Does the interviewer ask the same thing to any other bio tech CEO?
The reason people are comparing her bullshit made up science crap to Theranos is because she is not a medical person promoting a medical thing that supposedly checks for thousands of times more things than established science with a minuscule sample. Somehow this caught on in a ton of places through being the new hotness and will most likely implode when it is proven to be snake oil in less than a decade.
This is the exact same situation as Theranos.
Plenty of existing companies, like 23andMe, already screen for BRCA variants.
23andMe does an array. They only look at, I think, 44 BRCA variants of the 70,000. If you only look at a few, then you can give people false certainty.
And they’re obviously not testing embryos.
Yeah, they just do people.
Whereas you sequence the entire genome of embryos—orders of magnitude more information, on both monogenic and polygenic conditions, than anything that’s ever been done before. Even your main competitor, Genomic Prediction, only does arrays of embryos, looking for specific things.
Yeah. Whole genome is a big deal and a massive upgrade. You can mitigate risks for thousands of diseases that previously you weren’t able to detect. It’s kind of like a vaccine for everything that we know, genetic-wise, at once.
And all off a very small amount of DNA.
About 5 picograms per cell in an embryo sample. That’s a really, really tiny amount. From both a chemistry perspective and a computational perspective, we had to invent new things to make it so that you can recover whole-genome data.
It’s fucking tech bro bullshit, and the fact that she shares a gender with the other high profile person is a coincidence. While there is something to be said about not pushing back on the men doing the same thing, the criticism of her totally not eugenics because it involves computers logic is completely warranted and the comparison is spot on.
I also liked this bit:
[Reporter] But again, you think that’s unfair because of who your mom is. Because she suffers. Something about her suffering catalyzed in you the desire to end suffering in other people. Does that make sense?
No, that doesn’t make sense. Unfortunately, not all disease is genetic. There will still be disease and suffering. We are not that much of an optimistic fantasy.
Like she knows it’s partly optimistic fantasy that will eventually work if she just keeps it going, but let it slip. E. Holmes thought the same thing… just a little more time and we’ll have it.
I’m very glad I found the link to read the full article. She really does come off just like Elizabeth Holmes. When there isn’t a viable product to sell, you really have to sell yourself. There are plenty female tech CEOs that stay out of the media, just like the majority don’t know the names of most male tech CEOs, besides the few largest.
The way she reacted to the question of “your company is basically using exactly the same style of claimed technology as Theranos” as “Ugh. You’re a meanie. Women shouldn’t only be slaves!” is really quite telling.
