Once called the world's youngest female self-made billionaire, Elizabeth Holmes propagated a medical myth about the powers of testing and prevention. She was taken down by a newspaper reporter who revealed that her blood testing company, Theranos, was delivering inaccurate results, but the larger point of the saga is this: Even if her much-hyped testing device had worked, it probably wouldn't have made the world appreciably healthier.
It was hard to know if the proprietary technology worked, but not so hard to ask whether there's any evidence that more blood testing was what the world really needed.
In the new HBO documentary "The Inventor," the notion of blood testing as panacea is presented as a given. This assumption underlies the filmmaker's attempt to convince us that Holmes is not really such a bad person. (For a more serious but also dramatic treatment, read the writings of Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou.)