The Elizabeth Holmes Verdict and the Legal Loophole for 'Disruption'

When you first heard the story of the smoke-and-mirrors health care startup Theranos—whether through John Carreyrou’s Wall Street Journal exposés, his best-selling book Bad Blood, or the many podcasts and documentaries that followed—was your thought, “Gee, I hope at last there will be justice for the wealthy folks misled into investing a slice of their fortunes by Theranos’ charismatic founder, Elizabeth Holmes?” SUBSCRIBE Subscribe to WIRED and stay smart with more of your favorite Ideas writers. “I’m disappointed but not surprised at all,” Sheri Ackert, a potential witness whose hormone test from Theranos yielded worrisome, inaccurate results, told the Wall Street Journal. Yet when we take a step back, the way the Holmes verdicts went down should give us pause—they represent an important missed opportunity for the legal system to restrain Silicon Valley’s dangerous embrace of “disruption” at all costs by calling the intentional disregard for the public’s welfare a crime. Holmes, the piece explained, was “standing up to lawmakers and entities with vested interests for individuals’ fundamental right to access their health care information,” and in the process “may be doing more than running one of the world’s most successful startups—she may be starting a movement to change the health care paradigm as we know it.” Theranos was a phenomenon familiar in our time—in this case, a medical disruptor that was willing to practice faulty medicine on the way to achieving its dreams.