If the Nobel Prize winners and the bigshots at the National Cancer Institute are doing hype on the daily, then it makes sense that the loser wannabe bigshots at the Cleveland Clinic and the Scripps Translational Science Institute will imitate that behavior.

In a 2018 opinion piece, “Why was Theranos so believable? Medicine needs to look in the mirror,” Michael Joyner wrote:

I [Joyner] watched the recent “60 Minutes” report on the rise and fall of Theranos, the test-everything-with-a-fingerstick company that recently flamed out . . . To get some perspective on what happened, I looked back at what was said about the company just a few years ago. I re-read a December 2014 article in the New Yorker on Theranos and its founder . . .

What struck me as I compared the “60 Minutes” and New Yorker pieces, which were separated by only a little more than three years, is one simple question that seems to have been missed in the ashes: Why was the Theranos pitch so believable in the first place?

Joyner continued by pointing to positive quotes from two leaders in applied biological science:

– Dr. Toby Cosgrove, head of the Cleveland Clinic: “I think it’s potentially a breakthrough company. . . . It represents a major change in how we deliver health care.”

– Dr. Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute: “When Theranos tells the story about what the technology is, that will be a welcome thing in the medical community. . . . I tend to believe that Theranos is a threat.”

Where did this come from? He traces this to decades of hype by big-name biologists:

Who can forget when James Watson. . . . co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, made a prediction in 1998 to the New York Times that so-called VEGF inhibitors would cure cancer in “two years”?

At the announcement of the White House Human Genome Project in June 2000, both President Bill Clinton and biotechnologist Craig Venter predicted that cancer would be vanquished in a generation or two. . . .

That was followed in 2005 by the head of the National Cancer Institute, Andrew von Eschenbach, predicting the end of “suffering and death” from cancer by 2015, based on a buzzword bingo combination of genomics, informatics, and targeted therapy.

Verily, the life sciences arm of Google, generated a promotional video that has, shall we say, some interesting parallels to the 2014 TedMed talk given by Elizabeth Holmes. And just a few days ago, a report in the New York Times on the continuing medical records mess in the U.S. suggested that with better data mining of more coherent medical records, new “cures” for cancer would emerge. This optimism ignores that a major (the main?) purpose of electronic health records in the U.S. is billing and coding and that they are not research tools per se. . . .

So, why was the story of Theranos so believable in the first place? In addition to the specific mix of greed, bad corporate governance, and too much “next” Steve Jobs, Theranos thrived in a biomedical innovation world that has become prisoner to a seemingly endless supply of hype.

That makes sense, and I hadn’t thought about that in my earlier discussion of Theranos.

If the Nobel Prize winners and the bigshots at the National Cancer Institute are doing hype on the daily, then it makes sense that the wannabe bigshots at the Cleveland Clinic and the Scripps Translational Science Institute will imitate that behavior. “I tend to believe that Theranos is a threat,” indeed. Who talks like that??