Op-ed: The patent bargain is seriously busted.
"Early Theranos skeptics tended to be scientists who had heard the company’s extravagant claims and had asked the obvious question: does the tech really work? In 2014, a pathologist wrote that he was skeptical Theranos was using proprietary technology for many of its tests. Other scientists expressed frustration that Theranos had not shared its methods with the scientific community nor offered any evidence that the methods worked.
In April 2015, while Theranos was still enjoying mostly fawning press coverage, Business Insider published an article quoting some skeptical scientists. The article noted that “technical details about Theranos’ seemingly revolutionary tests are hard to come by.” Notably, Theranos had hundreds of patents by that point. Yet a scientist looking to understand how Theranos actually conducted its test wouldn’t learn anything useful from a typical Theranos patent. This is because companies can submit rough outlines of their processes, leaving out the key details, and still get patents. Recent legal reforms have only made this easier.
Business Insider wrote that if Theranos had come up with a “killer application” for microfluidics, “that may explain its reluctance to show the patented details that make its technology unique.” This sentence shouldn’t make sense, because patents are public by nature. So “patented details” should be public.
The sentence only makes sense when you realize that the patent bargain is utterly broken. The people who work within the patent system realize it. That’s why no one raised red flags when Theranos received hundreds of patents without telling the scientific community how its machines actually worked."
