Sometimes ethical courage is more than its own reward.

[NNadir]

A reassuring note in a time where evil seems to be winning out:

How blowing the whistle on the Theranos scandal transformed Erika Cheung’s career

Subtitle:

Cheung, a laboratory assistant straight from university, raised the alarm over dodgy science and a duplicitous boss.

By Benjamin Plackett Nature February 26, 2025.

Some excerpts:

Most people who have endured and survived a toxic workplace don’t end up as a character in an award-winning TV show. But Erika Cheung is not like most people, in more ways than one. She risked her livelihood, right to privacy and professional relationships by speaking out about scientific fraud.

Cheung’s journey from researcher to whistle-blower began when she was a junior scientist, not long after she graduated in 2013 from the University of California, Berkeley, with a bachelor’s degree in molecular and cellular biology.

She landed a job at Theranos, one of the most exciting companies in California at the time. Elizabeth Holmes had founded the company in 2003, aged just 19, and had claimed that Theranos was going to revolutionize disease diagnostics. The days of multiple blood samples and intrusive medical investigations would be replaced by the start-up’s technology, one that could detect everything from cholesterol to cocaine.

Theranos claimed that cancers, diabetes, anaemia, herpes, HIV/AIDS and many other ailments could all be diagnosed by the company’s ‘Edison device’, using just a few drops of blood from a finger-prick test.

At its zenith in 2015, Theranos was running close to 900,000 tests per year. It did so without the vigorous oversight of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the lack of which has since been criticized by legal experts as a significant loophole in the regulatory process...

...At one point, a man waited for Cheung outside her then workplace to hand her a letter threatening a lawsuit if she violated a Theranos non-disclosure agreement that she had signed.

“I left the country,” she says, fearing for her safety. “I’m half Hong Kongese and so I went to Hong Kong.”

From 2014 and 2019, she worked for the Hong Kong-based Betatron Venture Group, which invests in early-stage tech companies — helping to assess the merits and pitfalls of start-ups that the firm might want to fund.

Her boss there, Matthias Knobloch, says he couldn’t have wished for anyone better in that role. Cheung’s time at Theranos had taught her the importance of making sure that there are rigorous checks in place before investing in tech companies. “She has laid the foundation of much of the work we continue to this day, for example our ‘double-blindsided’ pitch process,” in which a funding pitch is given extra scrutiny by someone who is unaware of what the first evaluator thinks.

Cheung returned to the United States in 2019 to co-found Ethics in Entrepreneurship, a non-profit body based in Los Angeles, California, that develops resources and training for future leaders in the tech industry. She still runs the organization today, and says it rose from the ashes of the Theranos scandal...

It took courage to do what she did, and she worried about her safety given the powerful people she confronted with the truth.

Sometimes doing the right thing empowers you.

My favorite quote from Eleanor Roosevelt is appropriate here:

“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

It is a cause for celebration that people like Ms. Cheung are in this country and in this world.

[erronis]

1. Thank you for that good introduction. I look forward to reading the Nature piece.

And perhaps watching "The Dropout". (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dropout)

[druidity33]

2. Hear here! K&R, nt.