Matthew Klee - post #6

Something that I've found really interesting recently are podcasts and just how entertaining and diverse they are. This past summer I applied and was accepted into an Alzheimer's research lab internship and often had a lot of time by myself either analyzing or mounting (making into slides) mouse brains. During my first week I was too scared to even pull out my phone because I thought all research labs were super serious and intense all the time, however, I quickly learned that the main man on the study wasn't even in the lab the majority of the time and mostly had lab techs doing his work. These lab techs were very "chill" and not at all against talking and making the job enjoyable. In this, they introduced me to podcasts (a whole new free entertainment world for me). A podcast I found really interesting was called "The Drop Out." It was luckily the first one I landed upon and really piqued my interest in the potential of the platform. This podcast was about a woman in her early 30's who deceived some of the nation's top investors and science-medical minds. It went through her experience at an ivy-league college where she dropped out because of conflicting views with a couple professors. She then proceeded to make a start-up company that would be able to run thousands of tests on a "single drop of blood." But, all her claims were fake, she was able to scam hundreds of investors and gain millions of dollars for her company. She even had a factory/office building where the machines (called Theranos) were made. Many speculate that the woman (Elizabeth Holmes) didn't intend to scam the investors and that she was actually mentally ill and was a compulsive liar. In my opinion, Holmes wasn't much different than the typical academy kid, especially how we write essays. We often don't have our own opinion on a topic and just try to write enough fluff that the paper sounds good: like Holmes said enough inspiring things about changing the world of medicine when she really hadn't made any progress in doing so.