Tag Archives: blood donation

Customer Service, Technology

A Few Drops of Blood

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Wouldn’t it be amazing if all of our disease and medical health testing could be done with just a finger prick of blood? Elizabeth Holmes and I share that dream.

She said her company could do it with a small robotic lab-in-a-box. Now she’s facing criminal charges because the blood testing company she founded took some shortcuts.

Elizabeth Holmes and I Have a Dream

It’s a dream of being able to run medical tests from a single finger prick of blood. Holms initially had a dream of diagnosing and treating disease with a patch on the skin. That didn’t work out (neither the diagnosis nor treatment parts).

She founded a company called Real-Time Cures, which became Theranos. (The renaming presumably happened when the idea of providing “cures” to accompany the testing was abandoned).

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Customer Service, General, Social Media

Why I Donate Blood

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Folks who know me know I give blood, and do it as often as I’m allowed to. (That’s every 56 days, which means six or seven times a year.)

One morning the staff double-checked my stats and told me where my unit of blood was going: Straight to the hospital, where it would be used for a baby’s surgery. How can that not warm your heart?

What is your Favorite Cause?

When GeekWire selected me as their Geek of the Week, they asked about my favorite cause. That was an easy choice: “Blood donation. You donate a pint of blood and around an hour of your time, and you give a gift that’s priceless.”

Lately a related mini-cause is the Blood Donor Emoji (like the ones at the top of this post). As the sponsors explain:

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