By Elaine Carlson

I know we just had an important anniversary but the news I have been following this week is the fraud trial of Elizabeth Holmes.

For a while Holmes was a celebrity. Many people were impressed with how when she was 19, she dropped out of college (Stanford) and started a blood testing company – Theranos. It claimed it offered inexpensive tests that gave accurate results on small samples of blood ("a drop"). It grew quickly and once the company was valued at $9 Billion. Holmes became one of very few female self-made billionaires.

But it was not long before employees in the new company came forward with reports of problems. Their labs were not getting accurate results on the drops of blood they were testing. And the company was often in serious financial trouble.

CNBC News (9/8/2021) reported that in the prosecution's opening statement US Assistant Attorney Robert Lynch said, "This case is about fraud, about lying, and about cheating to get money."

"She owned it, she controlled it, the buck stopped with her," Leach said. "And as you'll hear from insiders, she was not an absentee CEO, she was there all the time. She sweated the details. She was in charge."

Attorney Lance Wade claimed, "Elizabeth Holmes worked herself to the bone for 15 years trying to make lab testing cheaper and more accessible. She poured her heart and her soul into that effort."

"In the end, Theranos failed, and Miss Holmes walked away with nothing," Wade said. "But failure is not a crime. Trying your hardest and coming up short is not a crime."

The first witness was So Han Spivey. From 2006 to 2017 she was Theranos' Corporate Comptroller. CNN Business (9/9/2021).

Spivey testified that between 2009 and 2015, "the company had accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars in losses." And she said, "Meanwhile Holmes' salary jumped from $200,000 to $400,000 during that time."

The second witness was the lab worker Ericka Cheung. Wall Street Journal (9/15/2021). The California Alumni Association Magazine (3/16/2021) tells how Cheung is featured in the HBO documentary "The Inventor: Out For Blood In Silicon Valley" on Theranos.

In the article Cheung told how excited she was to start working there. She was sure it was the perfect job, but it didn't take her long to become disturbed about what she was seeing. Once she was told to run quality control on a sample that had been tested.

"I kept running it and it kept failing, it kept failing," she said. "It was Thanksgiving Day, and no one was in the lab --- it was just me by myself --- and I was freaking out. I contacted this help line we had."

The Help Desk sent a research assistant to her who took out some data points and said: "These are outliers – you get rid of these."

Cheung talked to her supervisors and all of the senior scientists in the company. The scientists agreed that the process should be shut down until the problem was found "but Holmes and Theranos president Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani would demand to know why samples weren't being processed."

At the time Balwani was both the president of Theranos and Holmes' boyfriend. He is also facing fraud charges, but his trial won't start until after Holmes' trial is over.