Scientific Charlatans and Where to Find Them, Part 2

What men really want is not knowledge but certainty

Hello, 

This is a long essay about charlatans and the nature of science. I wrote it some time ago in Russian, and it was even partially published in a Russian-language journal, the link to which I will refrain from openly sharing for pseudonymity reasons. The current English version is approximately twice as long, updated, and unabridged. I will publish it in several parts, and this is part two. You can find part one here.

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***This is a long post that will be truncated into emails. I highly recommend you click on the title to read the whole 5,500-word post without interruption.***

Jan Steen, “The Quack”

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Scientific Charlatans and Where to Find Them, Part 2

“What men really want is not knowledge but certainty.” — Bertrand Russell

3. Charlatans of the Wallet

One of the liberties I've taken in writing this text is dividing the charlatans I know into those motivated by "money" and those driven by "ideas," crudely speaking, into fraudsters and madmen. I understand the flaws and contentiousness of this division. However, I stand by it—there are people who deceive mostly to extract money from the public or the state, and there are people who spout nonsense because they truly believe in it. This criterion guided my division of charlatans into two categories. Understandably, this division will be imprecise and not entirely reliable—you'll have to forgive me for that. Also, I'm interested in comparing people from these two groups to try to understand which of them poses more danger to us.

Before we start, a repeat of the previous disclaimer—I won't discuss medical charlatans. Not because I don't consider medicine a science (I do), but because there are simply too many of them. Various herbalists, medicine men, witches, homeopaths, folk healers, alternative medicine practitioners, and all that bunch. And I really don't want to delve into that river. I also won't mention various gurus, teachers, messiahs, and so on, for obvious reasons. To hell with them. They're mostly quite dull.

In this article, I'll only talk about those who call themselves scientists and try to pass off the nonsense they've concocted as real science. Believe me, there are plenty of those too.

3.1 Heinz Kurschildgen

The story of Kurschildgen is one of my favorites on this topic. First, because it's interesting in its own right, and second, because it allows for some clear analogies with the present day. History often repeats itself in one form or another—this case is no exception.

In 1914, young Heinrich Kurschildgen was working at a paint factory in Hilden. He might have inhaled some mercury there because, a few years later, he began claiming to have made several great scientific discoveries, including a method for making gold from common materials. Some people believed him; some gave him money. In 1922, he was first convicted of fraud. However, he wasn't imprisoned—the judges deemed him mentally ill. Kurschildgen was reprimanded, forbidden from using the word "gold" in conversations with investors, and released. I don't know if he was really insane, but he certainly had a knack for business. Gold took a back seat—Kurschildgen now claimed he could produce radium from uranium oxide. Radium, by the way, is about three hundred times more expensive than gold. He kept the technology a secret. Newspapers wrote about him, piquing the interest of scientists. The Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt in Berlin tested his claims and found them false. In 1929, Kurschildgen returned to gold. Failing to get money from President Hindenburg (Kurschildgen offered to manufacture gold from sand to pay off the reparations from World War I), he again turned to private investors, once again successfully. Duped sponsors sued, and Kurschildgen was finally imprisoned—for eighteen months.

The second half of the story is even more interesting. After being released from prison, Kurschildgen caught the attention of the Nazi party, which had come to power, with claims that he could make gasoline from plain water. A gift that never stops giving, this man was. If the word "nanotechnology" had existed then, it would have been mentioned repeatedly. He managed to convince Himmler and other high-ranking Nazis of his genius. Not everyone believed, of course—Goebbels, for example, called Kurschildgen a fraudster from the start. After the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt proved once again that Kurschildgen was lying, he was arrested. That could have been the end—Nazis have poor sense of humor—but no. He was imprisoned for three years and released early for good behavior after two, in 1938. When the disgraced Himmler heard about this, Kurschildgen was arrested again. However, he managed to convince the head of the Gestapo of his innocence, and this astonishing man was freed once more.

His final trick was an attempt to convince the Allied forces that he was a victim of Nazi repression. Kurschildgen presented himself as a scientist whose brilliant inventions were stolen by the evil Nazis. It didn't work—it never does!—but the attempt was certainly worth it.

3.2 Jan Sloot

In 1999, Jan Sloot claimed that he could compress any movie to just eight kilobytes without loss of quality, and died of a heart attack a day before signing a contract with a representative from Philips. True story! It's not very funny, rather quite sad, but it is true. Jan Sloot, a television repairman, had discovered a unique algorithm capable of compressing information almost to nothing. It's hard to believe—because it's impossible. Nonetheless, someone believed Sloot. His name was Roel Pieper, a professor of computer science and a member of the board of directors at Philips. After the company officially rejected Jan Sloot, Pieper began to help him privately and even invested nearly a million dollars into his project.

A day before signing the contract, in which Sloot was to disclose all the technical details of his compression algorithm, he suffered a heart attack and died. The compiler for his ingenious compression program was never found. It was supposedly stored on a regular 3.5-inch floppy disk.

Leaving aside the mathematical proofs of the impossibility of such a level of data compression, Jan Sloot was a fraudster. He behaved like a fraudster. He hid his invention from everyone until the contract was signed. He considered himself an expert in computer technology, though he had never formally studied it. He evaded direct questions. These are all fairly obvious signs of fraudsters.

The subsequent fate of Roel Pieper is unknown to me, unfortunately. He not only lost a ridiculous amount of money on this deal, but he also completely discredited himself as a computer technology specialist. I wouldn't be surprised if he was fired.

After the fall of Soviet Union, Russia turned into a true shrubbery of fraudsters and charlatans of all sorts: a combination of really unfocused governance and large sums of money floating around. Here's another somewhat funny yet very sad story from that times:

"The penchant for adventures took root in the Kremlin quite some time ago. Even the president couldn't resist the thirst for miracles and sensational discoveries overnight. In the early nineties, already at the helm of the state, Boris Yeltsin visited the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He walked around Akademgorodok. Touched thermonuclear installations. And during the traditional "round table" discussing defense issues, according to the academics, he stunned them with a strange question:

"Can you extract energy from stone?"

Naturally, the head of state was asked in return what he meant...

"Directly from the stone," the president said with characteristic directness.

Then he was explained that it was unthinkable, and the basic principles of nuclear fusion were briefly outlined to him.

"I was informed that it was possible," Boris Nikolayevich persisted.

"In that case, you were informed by charlatans," academician Eduard Kruglyakov couldn't hold back.

An awkward silence ensued. Behind the president stood his bodyguards, nearby trusted individuals, secretaries, deputies were shifting from foot to foot... In general, the discussion was steered into a humorous direction. After the meeting, Dr. Valentin Koptiug, at that time the vice-president of the Academy of Sciences and chairman of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told his colleagues that, according to his information, 120 million rubles from the budget had already been spent on extracting energy from stone."

Roman Shleinov, 17.05.99 "Novaya Gazeta" N 17

3.3 Erich von Däniken

Erich Anton Paul von Däniken is one of the most famous and popular ufologists. He has written thirty-three books, with a total circulation exceeding seventy million copies. Seventy million! That's why, out of all the hundreds of moneygrabbing ufologists, I chose him specifically. So, what exactly does he postulate?

Däniken claims that there is an advanced extraterrestrial civilization that has visited Earth several times and left its traces here. For example, the Antikythera mechanism, Stonehenge, the statues on Easter Island, the Piri Reis map, and so on, are artifacts of extraterrestrial origin. Another "proof" of Däniken's theory is that many religious and sacred texts supposedly describe the landing of a spacecraft—the most striking example being the visions of Ezekiel from the Old Testament. There are also many ancient images vaguely resembling people in spacesuits. Däniken believes this is enough to prove the extraterrestrial presence on Earth.

A polite person would call these conclusions far-reaching, an impolite one—idiotic. Just a reminder—Däniken sold seventy million copies of his books. Not Stephen King, of course, nor J.K. Rowling, but the order of magnitude is the same. And most interestingly, Däniken doesn't even hide that he's a charlatan.

For starters, he has two criminal convictions. Before his writing career, he served time in prison for fraud and, after the insane success of his first book, for tax evasion and embezzlement. But that's still okay—after all, it happens to the best of us. But in his marvelous 1974 Playboy interview, he practically admits to being a lying fraud. It's refreshing, to say the least. In it, he confesses to "inaccuracies" found in his books. For example, amazing archaeological finds, skeletons of aliens, and their belongings—they, according to him, definitely exist, but the name of the archaeologist who discovered them and the dates of the excavations were incorrectly stated in the book—therefore, he claims, real archaeologists have never heard of them. And there are many such excuses there. I'll quote a few indicative excerpts from his interview, along with comments.

It's true that I accept what I like and I reject what I don't like, but every theologian does the same. Everyone accepts just what he needs for his theory, and to the rest he says "Well, it's just a misunderstanding".

Perhaps theologians do that. Scientists cannot afford such a luxury.

I am accused of ignoring scientific facts. But scientists believe their facts are facts because other scientists told them so. Now I, with my own theory, came to the conclusion that they were wrong. [...] If I gave you the list of scientific "truths" of 50 years ago, we could see how few are still thought to be true. Guys like Darwin—I don't want to compare myself to such a nice gentleman, but it was always someone like Darwin against a whole world of so-called scientific facts. He had to doubt them. If you don't doubt them, you're at a standstill.

This is typical charlatan behavior. The claim “scientists believe in facts because other scientists told them so” is encountered in every other case. And comparing oneself to someone famous is also common. Darwin wasn't “against so-called facts”. Darwin disagreed with the theories and proposed his own, which explained the facts much better.

And the last quote that concludes the interview, I think, needs no comments.

Playboy: A last question comes to mind because of our favorite of your theories—the one in “Gold of the Gods” in which you suggest that the banana was brought to Earth from space. Were you serious?

Von Daniken: No, and not many people realize that.

Playboy: That leads us to ask if all your writing is a put-on. Are you, as one writer suggested, “the most brilliant satirist in German literature for a century”?

Von Daniken: The answer is yes and no. We have a wonderful term in German: jein. It's a combination of ja and nein, yes and no. In some part, absolutely not; I mean what I say seriously. In other ways, I mean to make people laugh.

Playboy: Well, you've succeeded in both aims.

Erich von Däniken is a fraudster, thief, plagiarist, and insanely popular writer of nonsense. Not a single fact he presented was confirmed, not one of his assumptions goes beyond the realm of idiocy. Several million people bought his books. He continues to write them to this day, the latest dated 2020. If his theories were slightly less idiotic, if he didn't talk about alien visits to Earth but something slightly more realistic—how many millions of people would have believed him?

3.4 Gennady Shipov and Anatoly Akimov

Shipov and Akimov were involved with so-called “torsion fields”. In the nineties, torsion fields were as much talked about as nanotechnologies are now, but unlike the latter, they are a fabrication from the first to the last formula. The term was coined in 1922 by mathematician Élie Cartan, who, of course, had nothing to do with the scam.

It all started in the mid-eighties. In the USSR, development of new weapons based on torsion technologies was being conducted in secret. I don't know whose bright idea this was. According to a report by the member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, E. Kruglyakov, 500 million rubles were allocated for this research. In 1989, the research was declassified and “tamed” - there was no longer any talk of weapons. Initially, the research was carried out at the so-called Center for Non-Traditional Technologies, and then at the private company MNTC "Vent" under the leadership of A. Akimov. These events led to the creation of the very commission on pseudoscience within the Russian Academy of Sciences and the subsequent recognition of the activities of the MNTC "Vent" company as deception and charlatanism. Accusations were made of falsifying results and embezzling budget funds.

After the final collapse of the Soviet Union, the group was disbanded, and Akimov opened a private enterprise called "International Institute of Theoretical and Applied Physics" , which later turned into the company "Yuvitor". The company's website can still be visited today. A nice flying saucer graces its homepage.

Shipov came to torsion fields from a "more physical" side. His most famous work is the illiterate book "Theory of Physical Vacuum. Theories, Experiments, and Technologies". It has nothing to do with science—except maybe with bad science fiction. Shipov's "physical vacuum" is nothing new and is essentially the same ether that hundreds of idiots around the planet have been fruitlessly searching for. Criticism of Shipov's book and the theory of torsion fields in general can easily be found on the internet (for example, the article "Torsion Myths" by A.V. Byalko or "Pseudoscience. How does it threaten science and society?" by E.P. Kruglyakov).

Torsion fields were attributed various miraculous effects, but in reality, only one was found—just talking about them had the ability to attract money. Among the other stated properties were healing abilities, instant communication at any distance with negligible energy costs, changing the properties of materials, and world peace. I'll provide a very amusing protocol of the experimental verification of one such claim. The text is short and pleasant to read—practically a modern play, Harold Pinter plus Carl Sagan.

PROTOCOL OF MEASUREMENTS OF ELECTRICAL RESISTANCE OF COPPER SAMPLES OF MNTC "VENT"

Participants in the experiment:

Borovik-Romanov A.S. - head of the Department of Low Temperature Physics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology;

Zavaritskiy N.V. - Professor at the P.L. Kapitsa Institute for Physical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences;

Maksarev R.Y. - representative of MNTC "VENT";

Zhotikov V.G. - Senior Specialist of the Department of Fundamental Research of the Ministry of Science of Russia.

Purpose of the experiment:

Experimental verification of the "discovery" made by representatives of MNTC "VENT" about reducing the electrical resistance of copper samples obtained by solidification from the melt under the influence of so-called "torsion fields" by approximately 80 times.

Samples and measurement methodology:

The representative of MNTC "VENT" (Maksarev R.Y.) offers 2 control samples of copper, obtained, according to him, under different conditions of copper solidification from the melt. One of these samples was subjected to "torsion fields" during solidification. According to measurements performed at MNTC "VENT", the resistance of this sample was 80 times less than that of the second sample, which was not subjected to the influence of these fields.

Zavaritskiy N.V. asks how the measurements were performed.

Maksarev R.Y. reports that the measurements were conducted using a standard resistor box and a universal ammeter-voltmeter. He describes the details of the measurements performed at MNTC "VENT".

Zavaritskiy N.V. (unable to contain his laughter) says that any 3rd-year student at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology knows that it is impossible to measure the electrical resistance of copper correctly in this way, as the resistivity of copper is low. It is necessary to use a four-point measurement scheme with separate current and potential contacts (draws the measurement scheme on the board).

Zavaritskiy N.V. states that the issue is clear, there is no point in wasting time on this nonsense, and suggests going for coffee.

Borovik-Romanov A.S. and Zhotikov V.G. share Zavaritskiy N.V.'s opinion, but they ask him to conduct the necessary measurements.

Zavaritskiy N.V. agrees and demands that Zhotikov V.G. recall his youth spent at the P.L. Kapitsa Institute for Physical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences and perform the necessary soldering work, as well as keep a record of the measurements.

Zhotikov V.G. takes Zavaritskiy N.V.'s micro-soldering iron and, under his supervision, solders the current and potential contacts to samples No. 1 and No. 2.

Zavaritskiy N.V. reports that Zhotikov V.G., working at the Ministry of Science, has not forgotten how to solder well.

Experiment:

Soldering is completed, and samples No. 1 and No. 2 are inserted one by one into Zavaritskiy N.V.'s experimental setup for measuring low resistance values. 

Discussion of the results:

Based on the obtained results, the three participants in the experiment conclude that the claim by the representative of MNTC "VENT" about an 80-fold difference in electrical resistances of "irradiated" and "non-irradiated" copper samples by so-called "torsion fields" DID NOT FIND experimental confirmation.

Borovik-Romanov A.S. and Zavaritskiy N.V. say: this became clear immediately after the representative of MNTC "VENT" reported the measurement methodology used in this organization for this "effect."

Zavaritskiy N.V. (pulling a physics reference book from the bookshelf) reads that the conductivity of copper in the samples provided by MNTC "VENT" is an order of magnitude worse than the values listed in reference books. He turns to Zhotikov V.G. and asks, what should we do?

Zhotikov V.G. says that the Nobel Prize on this matter will have to wait. The results will be reported to the Ministry of Science.

(Everyone is silent)

Maksarev R.Y. says that the room is very stuffy and asks for permission to leave. Leaves.

Borovik-Romanov A.S. asks Zhotikov V.G. to record everything as fully as possible and suggests everyone go for coffee.

This should be enough to understand everything about them. But just in case, I will provide some quotes from Akimov with comments from the "In Defense of Science" bulletin of the commission combating pseudoscience. There will be no physics involved.

Akimov: “During the program's formation stage, several well-known scientists took an active part, one of the first being the director of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Dr N.N. Bogoliubov.”

Dr. N.N. Bogoliubov: “I inform you that I have no relation to these works, as I learned about them from your letter. All references to my name are unfounded.”

Akimov: “As was shown by Dr L.B. Okun, a spin wave (torsion wave) in a spin-ordered medium (Physical Vacuum) will propagate in the same way as a gravitational wave, i.e., a torsion wave cannot be shielded.”

Dr. L.B. Okun: “I consider it my duty to declare that none of my works (and I have written a number of articles on the theory of vacuum) contain any mention of torsion fields.”

Akimov: “... many of our products (torsion generators) successfully passed scientific expertise precisely in academic institutes, for example in the Institute of Physics of the NAS of Ukraine and others, about which the corresponding protocols were made.”

Director of the Institute of Physics of the NAS of Ukraine, Dr. M.S. Brodin: “The Institute of Physics of the NAS of Ukraine has never conducted scientific expertise in the field of torsion fields.”

Nevertheless, my favorite quote from Anatoly Akimov is as follows: “It is impossible to imagine that physical constants emerged during evolution. Therefore, they were created by God.” Let's leave it at that.

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Eduardo Rosales, “Charatan de Aldea”

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3.5. Viktor Petrik

Oh, Petrik. The self-proclaimed Leonardo of our times. I must admit, I feel a strange, somewhat perverse form of respect for him. Of course, he is no Leonardo of our times—he is the Cagliostro of our times. He doesn't sweat the small stuff; he is a true giant among charlatans: in scale, audacity, and variety of methods. His arsenal includes deception, bribery, blackmail, threats, connections, and much more. If anyone needs lessons in fraud, they should go to Petrik. Hopefully, by that time, he will already be in prison.

There's no doubt about the absolute, unclouded falsehood of all of Petrik's claims to science. Sometimes I even think there isn't a single person in the world capable of taking his words at face value. (Actually, there are—and that's the sad part.) Partly, this is where his greatness lies—Petrik took a different path. He didn't bother with any semblance of reasonableness or thoughtfulness in his inventions and patents, with logic or even the presence of the science he preaches. They are utterly schizophrenic, but he doesn't care. He plays a different game—on connections, kickbacks, and bribes. What can't be bought can be intimidated. Those who aren't afraid of Petrik will be scared of his friends from the FSB. Petrik has an amazing ability to sense all the loopholes, gaps, and cracks in Russian quasi-scientific policy and immediately squeezes his corpulent body through them. Quite boldly, it must be said. A man of great intellect. If only he had tried to do something constructive even once in his life, he would likely have achieved great success.

I will provide selected facts from his biography, as well as some excerpts from the 2012 interview with Dr. Evgeny Borisovich Alexandrov, dedicated to Petrik.

Petrik was born in 1946. According to his own statement, he graduated from Leningrad State University in 1975 with a degree in "psychology." However, there is no official data on him receiving any diplomas from LSU. It is also known that he tried to obtain a diploma from the physics department of LSU, unsuccessfully. He was a hypnotist. Worked at the V.M. Bekhterev Research Institute of Psychoneurology. In 1984, he was sentenced to eleven years for economic crimes—fraud, attempted robbery, extortion, coercion to give false testimony, etc. He was released early in 1989. He started working as an artist, then began growing artificial gemstones. He then became famous for being able to obtain a rare isotope of osmium at home. In connection with this, he was arrested but then released. In the 1990s, he worked as an economic advisor to the St. Petersburg Mayor's Office. Catch the irony? He acquired friends, money, and a house near St. Petersburg, and then plunged headfirst into business and then into science. His main direction of attack was, seemingly, litigious: he sued many people for patent infringement—including Gosznak, a company responsible for printing all of Russia’s money. In the last one, the attempt was to sue for 1 percent of the entire monetary mass of Russia for using the patented "lumophore" technology—marks on banknotes using the same osmium. I told you, he doesn't sweat the small stuff. Of course, the court denied him—the invention had been patented by a member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Feofilov, back in 1966.

Some of Petrik's other methods were discussed by E. B. Alexandrov in a lengthy interview. Despite my cuts, it’s still a lot—but it's all good stuff.

E.B. Alexandrov: I participated in the Tartakovsky commission, which examined eleven innovative discoveries by Petrik. At some point, Boris Gryzlov (then—chairman of the Duma) called us and ordered that the scientists hear Petrik out. Gryzlov brought Petrik to the Institute of General and Inorganic Chemistry, where about twenty scientists were gathered, and Petrik presented his "innovative discoveries" in the field of nanotechnologies, as he put it.

After that, a team of five scientists went to Petrik's laboratory in Vsevolozhsk near St. Petersburg to see it all. After which Petrik put them all in front of the camera, and under the prompts of the hosts, they had to say what they thought about Petrik. And they said that he is a genius.

Question: How could these people..? Was there a gun pointed at them?

E.B. Alexandrov: No. After that... It smelled like a lot of money.

Question: What about honor?

E.B. Alexandrov: It's a good question. I think that all the people who praised him in every possible way were very high-ranking scientists. All of them were in positions, directorial positions... They need to feed their institutes. And it was clear that some money would be swindled for this work. How it would be divided was unknown.

[…]

Yes, and then the club of science journalists started to stir up a scandal about the this performance. And it was ordered to organize a commission, which is independent, not some commission on pseudoscience, nothing like that... let the chemists, who were mostly involved, be in charge. Under the chairmanship of Dr. Tartakovsky, a commission is formed to deal with Petrik's affairs. We met for the first time and found ourselves in a terrible situation because there was nothing to analyze – he had no publications. He had no publications, only some vague patents in large numbers. Most of them were expired, not paid for. Nowadays, all patents are granted not as evidence that it will work, but as evidence that, for example, nobody has said anything like this before, and all fees are paid. Therefore, anything can be patented. So, he has a lot of patents, many of which were quite reasonable because they were composed by specialists bought in defense industry institutions.

Petrik tried to befriend Dr. Alexandrov. He took him to his laboratory, then to a restaurant, then offered him a job. Evgeny Borisovich politely refused—other methods were then employed.

E.B. Alexandrov: First, I suddenly received a letter from an unknown person where it was written that our national treasure is Petrik, our main power of the country. And you are undermining him. Moreover, you conspired with a renegade abroad to discredit him overseas. And since the country's top people support him, you are actually planning to undermine the top authorities. And "be careful," he said. "Be careful. Your disloyal attitude to the authorities is well known. But this is another matter. Now you are going to do something completely outrageous. And be careful, Petrik hasn't found out about it yet because his wrath will be terrible." I immediately... By this time, I already had some consultation with the FSB, from the Academy of Sciences protection service, which said: do not engage with him at all, do not talk, cut off all conversations. He calls me, and I immediately say: I don't want to talk anymore. Then he left a message on my answering machine. On the answering machine, he left basically the content of this letter and said: "We warned you, you climbed to such heights that you cannot understand with your weak mind. You are trying to accuse the highest people of the state of bribery, corruption. I don't care what will happen to you". I have it all recorded. "I don't care what will happen to you, but you should think about what will happen to the Academy of Sciences." It ended up with him calling me eventually and saying that I was wrong to contact the FSB, that they should have told me that I am dealing with an extremely dangerous person, and he has at least 20 ways to kill people without leaving traces, and besides, he owns nanotechnologies that allow him to induce cancer. That's when I hung up.

The last—and biggest—scam of Petrik is water purification filters. Indeed, the money that can be made on osmium does not compare to the money that can be made on clean water. His friends from the Russian government helped Petrik here. The amount of money that could be embezzled exceeded all reasonable limits. But people intervened, and it seems they stopped this idiocy.

E.B. Alexandrov: They [Petrik's filters] don't excel in anything special. The only thing is that these filters are much more expensive than all the others. But they have a logo, there's "United Russia", there's Shoigu. Now they have already fought among themselves in the end. Petrik only supplied this mixture, the filters were made by another person, Kudryashov. And then they parted ways because Kudryashov didn't like the mixture he was given. The quality was inconsistent. And he took his patent, and now he makes his filters, and complains that Petrik promises to kill him and his children, referring to his connections with very authoritative people.

The only thing that somewhat consoles me in this story is that Petrik seems to have been gradually calmed down. Of course, he still blusters, but he's rarely taken seriously anymore. The press, largely thanks to Dr. Alexandrov, Dr. Kruglyakov, and the Club of Science Journalists, has finally taken the right path. And there's a chance that in a couple of years, Viktor Petrik will finally deflate.

3.6 Elizabeth Holmes

I hesitated whether to put this story in. It is significantly more recent, and some might say, not even over. I think it is, though. And since here, as opposed to some other cases, there are very good sources that I can refer you to, I will just graze the surface of this story. And if you’d like to know more, you should really get Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, by John Carreyrou. It’s a fascinating read.

To briefly summarize the whole bloody affair, Elizabeth Holmes opened a start-up company called Theranos and claimed she can build a machine that could run hundreds of diagnostic tests on a single droplet of blood. Effectively, making long and exhausting blood tests a thing of the past. Her personal hero was always Steve Jobs, and her personal mantra—siliconvalleyian “fake it till you make it”.

Well, what works in computer sciences does not always work in real ones.

In the end, after a thorough journalistic investigation by John Carreyrou and his team at the Wall Street Journal, the truth was revealed: Holmes’ claims about the possibilities of the device were exaggerated to the point of complete falsehood, and the company, which at that point was evaluated at several billions of dollars, was in fact worth nothing. More importantly, the diagnostics that the devices did provide were faulty and unreliable, which created real danger for the people who used them.

The story of Elizabeth Holmes is both similar and different from those you read above. It’s easy to list the similarities. The main one is that she is also a charlatan, a person who deceived the public in order to make money. She had no sufficient education, used her personal connections, including high-up government officials, and defrauded, bullied, and threatened everyone who tried to reveal her machinations, be it journalists or her former colleagues.

Frankly, it’s harder to point out the differences between her and, say, Victor Petrik or Heinz Kurschildgen. But I believe there is one. Elisabeth Holmes’ problem was not that she completely made up a technological advancement. She didn’t step outside the boundaries of reality. Nothing she claimed was physically impossible, just technically extremely challenging. And, the fact is, she assembled some of the best people in the fields of miniaturisation, microfluidics, and machine engineering in the world.

The problem with Theranos was severe mismanagement and overpromise. She promised too much, too soon. This is quite typical for a software development startup, but it doesn’t work with chemistry, biology, or engineering. Ten years more of research and development, and chances are, she would have a functioning device.

But when she saw she would never deliver within the ridiculous deadlines she herself promised her investors and customers, she panicked, and that’s how the lies started. And as soon as they start, they never really finish.

I was following Theranos’ story almost from the very beginning, and I learned a lot from it. And even now, if I meet at a conference a company that specializes in blood analysis, I ask them what they think about this whole deal. Nothing good, usually. After Theranos’ story went public, trust in these technologies went down. A whole industry suffered because of a charlatan.

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I’ll stop here. In the next part of the series, we’ll look into another type of charlatans—those whose main motivation is not financial but ideological. I.e., “the loonies”.

Best,

K.