Elizabeth Holmes’ secret links to China: the disgraced Theranos CEO, played by Amanda Seyfried in The Dropout, speaks fluent Mandarin and met ex-boyfriend Ramesh Balwani while studying in Beijing
Elizabeth Holmes is no stranger to global attention. She became a cult figure when her company Theranos garnered millions in investment, only for it to emerge that the science behind her ideas was not solid and that she had in fact defrauded investors.
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Unlike Fuisz’s version of events, the article quoted Holmes’ father as saying that Stanford’s admissions clerk got so frustrated by Elizabeth’s constant pleas to be accepted onto the course that he gave her the test in Mandarin on the spot – and she aced it. She then went on to complete three years of college Mandarin while still in senior school.
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The birth of Theranos
According to The New Yorker, Elizabeth applied to Stanford in 2001 and was given a small research stipend as part of the President’s Scholar programme. She opted to study chemical engineering and asked the then dean of the engineering department, Channing Robertson, if she could work in his lab alongside the PhD students. After some persuasion he agreed. In the article he tells how Holmes then declared she wanted to go to Singapore’s Genome Institute for the summer – something that would have required her to speak fluent Mandarin, which she said she did.
It was this that prompted Robertson to realise that Holmes was “different”, he says in the interview.
While in Singapore, she worked on testing for Sars and it was there that she came up with the idea to do multiple tests using a drop of blood. In 2004 she dropped out of Stanford and convinced Robertson to be the technical adviser and first board member of her new company, Theranos. Remarkably, he ended up working for Theranos full time, despite concerns from his peers, who spoke about the extraordinary case on podcast The Dropout, on which the new Hulu series is based on.
- Amanda Seyfried is about to hit our screens portraying Holmes in Hulu’s adaptation of podcast The Dropout, while her one-time boyfriend is about to go on trial this March
- It seems the former Theranos CEO’s past life is catching up with her – but few realise Elizabeth Holmes’ ties to Asia, and the pivotal role they played in the Theranos story