It is necessary to begin with two historical events. One is in the public domain, and the other is personal.

In 2003, a company was founded in the USA by a 19-year-old American lady named Elizabeth Holmes. It invented a revolutionary machine named ‘The Edison’, which was supposed, using one drop of blood collected from pricking a finger, to run ‘loads’ of tests and give a holistic read-out on the systems of the human body. The invention, if it were confirmed, would be the long-sought El Dorado of Laboratory Medicine – comprehensive diagnosis at the prick of a finger.

The second story goes thus. Sometime in 1978, in a final examination in Medicine in Ibadan, one of the essay options on the examination paper was the proposition that in the future, Healthcare innovation might spawn incredibly advanced machines. Could they replace human beings?

When you went for the later oral examination, which medical students generally found more intimidating, you found yourself at the mercy of an External Examiner whose accent sounded East African. He was smiling, which was not necessarily a good sign. He uttered some words that sounded strangely familiar. You realised he was quoting from the essay you had written. He asked you to explain.

It was a subject of passion, and you forgot yourself momentarily. He interjected a gentle query here and there. The back-and-forth took on some of the aspect of your regular post-prandial argumentation with friendly duellists Jude and Uzu at the students’ cafeteria in Alexander Brown Hall.
When you were informed your time was up, you looked askance at the panel. Your mind was screaming, ‘But you haven’t examined me!’

The drama of that final ‘Viva’ came back to you when you first learnt of Elizabeth Holmes and her company Theranos. Your conclusion, in the essay as in the ‘Viva’, was that great innovation was sure to come, but human beings would always need to remain in charge of the healthcare of other human beings, using and directing the machines.

You were not the only one enthralled by the promise of Theranos. It took Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and some of America’s leading politicians by storm.

Elizabeth Holmes was born in 1984 to a well-to-do family in Washington, D.C. In High School, in Houston, she showed interest in computer programming. At the age of 18, she was admitted to Stanford University to study Chemical Engineering. After her freshman year, she worked at the Genome Institute of Singapore. She filed her first patent in that year, and shortly afterwards, she dropped out of school to found her company. It was initially named ‘Real Time Cures’, and its defining purpose was to ‘democratise healthcare’. The name was changed to ‘Theranos’, combining ‘therapy’ and ‘diagnosis’.

Within a few years, through the sheer force of her vision and persuasiveness, she was able to raise huge funds in venture capital for her project.

Ten years into the life of the company, Theranos started a groundbreaking relationship with the Pharmacy and Lifestyle chain Walgreens. People could walk in from the streets to have a drop of their blood taken for analysis. It was not only ‘democratising’ Medicine. It was demystifying and domesticating the most advanced capabilities of Medical Diagnostics.

People were falling over themselves to associate with Elizabeth, the pretty young prodigy. Former Secretary of State George Shultz joined the Board of Directors of her company. Elizabeth appeared on the covers of Fortune and Forbes. Over $700 million was eagerly ploughed into Theranos by investors, and the private company was valued at several billion dollars. Elizabeth was rated by Forbes as the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire. She had 18 US patents and 66 foreign ones.

2014, the year she turned 30, and 2015 were the years when Elizabeth’s cup was full and brimming over. She was appointed a member of the Harvard Medical School Board of Fellows, and was on Time Magazine’s ‘100 Most Influential People’.

Barely a year later, the edifice began to crumble.

Questions were raised about the Edison device. Whistleblowers started emerging. There were allegations that the results were inaccurate, and that the company was diluting specimens and using other people’s machines for most of their tests. The Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) sent the company a warning after an inspection of its laboratory in Newark showed irregularities with staff proficiency, procedures and equipment, and later banned Elizabeth from owning, operating or directing blood-testing services for two years.

Then an investigator published a tell-all book titled ‘Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies of a Silicon Valley Startup.’

Lawsuits followed.

The gates of doom were closing in.

In June 2018, Elizabeth and her Chief Operating Officer were indicted by a federal grand jury for wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The trial was delayed by the advent of COVID-19. In 2022, she was found guilty of guilty of defrauding investors, among other charges, and sentenced to 11 and one-quarter years in federal prison.

On appeal, in March 2026, her sentence was reduced by one year.

She is not likely to be freed until 2030, unless she gets a pardon from President Trump.

Assailed by tragedy and disgrace, in which her estimated fortune has gone from $4.5 billion dollars to zero, Elizabeth has apparently found love in the heir to an American fortune. They have two children. The family has relocated to be close to her in prison.

Podcasts, films and documentaries have been made about Elizabeth, including the trending 2026 documentary ‘You Can See Everything’.

Last year, from prison, Elizabeth declared, defiantly, that she still intends to revolutionise Medical Diagnostics.

You are left to reflect on her certainty that a ‘Miracle Machine’ is still attainable, and even inevitable. How might all this affect your unfinished conversation with your East African Examiner of old if you were to run into him today on a street in Nairobi, you wonder?