Elizabeth Holmes personally approved investor presentations, court hears

Enlarge / Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos Inc., left, arrives at federal court in San Jose, Calif., on Tuesday, Oct. 12, 2021. (credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg)

Over the past few days, jurors in Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes' criminal trial have been hearing about the now-infamous demos given to Theranos investors. The devices would make noise but not produce results, they ran apps that blocked error messages from appearing, and in some cases, instead of tests happening in front of visitors, blood samples were taken elsewhere for analysis.

Yesterday, the picture resolved itself further as testimony from Daniel Edlin, a product manager who was friends with Holmes' brother Christian, continued. Edlin revealed that Holmes herself and Daniel Young, a Theranos scientist and vice president, played key roles in what ultimately transpired during demos for visitors and investors.

But first, Edlin was cross-examined by Holmes' defense attorney Kevin Downey, who showed the court a series of emails from a US military officer who was part of the team evaluating Theranos devices for use on the battlefield in Africa. In a June 2012 email, Young wrote that he felt very good about reliability for this deployment" after testing 100 protocols over the course of 48 hours in 110 F conditions. Yesterday, the court heard from Edlin that the device would only run properly between 72-82 F. Either Edlin or Young is mistaken or there's some nuance here that we'll hopefully hear about later.

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