Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

by John Carreyrou

To Tyler’s dismay, data runs that didn’t achieve low enough CVs were simply discarded and the experiments repeated until the desired number was reached. It was as if you flipped a coin enough times to get ten heads in a row and then declared that the coin always returned heads. Even within the “good” data runs, Tyler and Erika noticed that some values were deemed outliers and deleted. When Erika asked the group’s more senior scientists how they defined an outlier, no one could give her a straight answer. Erika and Tyler might be young and inexperienced, but they both knew that cherry-picking data wasn’t good science. Nor were they the only ones who had concerns about these practices. Aruna, whom Tyler liked and respected, also disapproved of them and so did Michael Humbert, a jovial German scientist Tyler had befriended.