A new A24 documentary, “You Can See Everything,” reached theaters today, and STAT responded by compiling a reading list from its years of reporting on Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. The documentary follows the former Silicon Valley executive after she invited a film crew into her home days before starting her prison sentence.
The retrospective does not introduce a new Theranos business development. Instead, it re-centers a case that remains unusually durable in biotech memory because it combined capital, secrecy, and scientific claims that did not hold up under scrutiny. Holmes was convicted in 2022 of defrauding investors and sentenced to more than 11 years in federal prison.
The road here
STAT pointed back to its reporting from the company’s earlier rise, including coverage of the American Association for Clinical Chemistry meeting in 2016, where Holmes was expected to reveal Theranos data but, in STAT’s telling, largely did not. A clinical pathologist quoted at the time compared the appearance to inviting Al Capone to discuss accounting practices and asked whether it was acceptable to let someone speak about science after using it “so horribly inappropriately.”
The outlet also highlighted its later reporting on layoffs, legal problems, and the company’s shutdown. Last year, STAT published an op-ed by Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz that argued there was suspicious familiarity between Holmes’ original efforts and her partner’s new diagnostic company, Haemanthus.
Why the story persists
The continuing interest says something uncomfortable about biotech innovation: even after the legal case is settled, the sector still has to keep teaching the same lesson about evidence. Theranos remains a reference point not because the underlying business survived, but because the gap between presentation and validation became so extreme that it still frames how audiences judge high-concept health technology.
That matters commercially as much as culturally. A company can attract attention with a compelling narrative, but diagnostic credibility is cumulative and brittle. Once trust is broken, later ventures connected to the same network of people can face immediate skepticism, as the mention of Haemanthus suggests.
The documentary release therefore functions as more than entertainment timing. It revives a cautionary archive showing that in biotech, scientific opacity may create short-term mystique, but over time it raises the cost of belief for everyone else trying to sell a hard technical claim.
