I’ve heard of PCR before (polymerase chain reaction) where more copies of a DNA sample can be rapidly made. If the problem was that the quantity of blood that Theranos uses is too small, why wasn’t PCR used/ (if it was) why didn’t it work?
Also if I’m completely misunderstanding PCR, if someone could for that too, I’d appreciate it, thank you!
In: 148
Many people have explained why it couldn’t work, so I’ll explain how it could have (possibly) worked.
Imagine we want to build a machine to measure a person’s height but we can’t directly do so. What we can do instead is take data like a person’s shoe size, their heart rate and their skin temperature to infer their height indirectly.
Now, obviously a doctor who needed to know your exact height to make a decision on whether or not to operate would simply measure your height. But if you were just monitoring your height on a regular basis down at the local Walgreen’s, our inference would probably be a decent enough guess to judge whether we needed to go through with the more complicated and invasive direct measurement of height.
Indeed, this is essentially what doctors are doing with actual medical tests. They’re not directly measuring health conditions so much as inferring health conditions indirectly from imperfect measures.
That being said, the device I’m theorizing about above wasn’t what Theranos was trying to build. The device I’m proposing above is powered by solid principles of data analysis. Their device appears to have been powered by magic pixie dust.
I’ve heard of PCR before (polymerase chain reaction) where more copies of a DNA sample can be rapidly made. If the problem was that the quantity of blood that Theranos uses is too small, why wasn’t PCR used/ (if it was) why didn’t it work?
Also if I’m completely misunderstanding PCR, if someone could for that too, I’d appreciate it, thank you!
In: 148
Many people have explained why it couldn’t work, so I’ll explain how it could have (possibly) worked.
Imagine we want to build a machine to measure a person’s height but we can’t directly do so. What we can do instead is take data like a person’s shoe size, their heart rate and their skin temperature to infer their height indirectly.
Now, obviously a doctor who needed to know your exact height to make a decision on whether or not to operate would simply measure your height. But if you were just monitoring your height on a regular basis down at the local Walgreen’s, our inference would probably be a decent enough guess to judge whether we needed to go through with the more complicated and invasive direct measurement of height.
Indeed, this is essentially what doctors are doing with actual medical tests. They’re not directly measuring health conditions so much as inferring health conditions indirectly from imperfect measures.
That being said, the device I’m theorizing about above wasn’t what Theranos was trying to build. The device I’m proposing above is powered by solid principles of data analysis. Their device appears to have been powered by magic pixie dust.
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