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Abstract

Would you trust an entrepreneur who offered to sell you a truthtelling machine, but refused to tell you how it worked? Elizabeth Holmes persuaded investors to sink $700 million into her health tech company, Theranos, with a simple promise: she had invented a machine that could do the impossible. Holmes claimed her invention, a literal black box called an Edison, could run more than two hundred diagnostic tests in under an hour using only a single drop of blood. The Edison purportedly represented “a Holy Grail in the field of microfluidics.” Theranos was going to revolutionize healthcare and change the world. Instead, Holmes is serving a prison sentence for conspiracy and fraud. The Edisons did what black boxes do best: convert inputs into outputs without revealing how. Theranos did not operate based on proven scientific principles, but a castle of overpromises and lies protected by a moat of so-called “trade secrecy” considerations.

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