Theranos and the elitist belief in magical thinking

Gavin Chait, 8 July 2016

If an African leader stood up at a meeting of European investors and declared that his country’s agricultural success could be attributed to traditional muthi, he would be regarded with an embarrassed sigh.

Except when it’s the British aristocrat, Prince Charles, and he’s talking about using homeopathy to treat his cows, then he’s treated with polite applause.

Nowhere is that hypocrisy more visible than in the story of President Yahyah Jammeh of Gambia who claims his homeopathy can cure AIDS. He is supported by Ainsworths, a homeopathic dealer which operates under a royal seal of appointment from Prince Charles.

Superstition is alive and well in the West, only instead of skins and furs, it wears a white lab coat and attempts to look respectable.

There are two ways in which this is having a destructive effect on humanity.

The first is in adaptation to Climate Change.

There is near universal scientific support for the theory that global warming is real and caused by people. Greenpeace and other pressure groups are in full accord with scientific thinking here.

Scientists also have near universal agreement on the benefits of genetically modified organisms. Greenpeace and other pressure groups refuse to accept scientific thinking on this topic, promoting the woolly world of ‘organic’ instead.

Their thinking can be summarised as being that climate change confirms Greenpeace’s bias against large corporations as the cause of all evil, while accepting genetically modified crops as being healthy would contradict that belief, since it demonstrates that large corporations are key to solving the world’s problems.

Each could be true, but Greenpeace insists that corporations can only be evil, hence their loathing of GM.

This has become so worrying – being that it denies life-saving crops to African countries already suffering under drought and famine – that more than 109 Nobel Prize- winners have signed an open letter demanding that Greenpeace end their campaign against GM foods: “Scientific and regulatory agencies around the world have repeatedly and consistently found crops and foods improved through biotechnology to be as safe as, if not safer than those derived from any other method of production.”

Magical thinking against real and working science prevents access for those people who would most benefit from it.

The second destructive outcome is where magical thinking, dressed up in scientific garb, undermines real science.

The worst and most recent of many such scandals involves Theranos, a US-based medical laboratory service. Theranos promised investors and medical professionals an end to painful and unpleasant needle-based blood specimen collection, and a world of cheap and easily available medical tests.

The ‘secret’ was their heavily secret blood-testing device called Edison. Instead of traditional venepuncture (a needle, to the rest of us), they used a few drops of blood from a finger-stick puncture. Forget that actual medical professionals and scientists pointed out that such a small amount of blood, drawn from a peripheral part of the body, would produce wildly varying results no matter how clever the diagnostic machine, investors hurled $400 million at it.

By 2014, the company – and its charming, blonde, blue-eyed CEO Elizabeth Holmes – was estimated to be worth $9 billion.

Eventually, at the top of the hype train, the Food and Drug Administration began to look into the company, pointing out that there was almost no quality control and that - far from using some secret technology – most tests were being run on traditional devices.

Theranos was forced to void all their test results. One of their main labs has been shut down. Last week Holmes was banned from operating any lab for two years.

Along the way, Walmart fell for the hype and entered into a costly partnership, and hundreds of normally reasonable investors have lost their shirts. Theranos is now worth nothing.

Magical thinking is not science and, given the range of challenges humanity faces, it’s time we took it a bit more seriously.