Elizabeth Holmes, Sociopath?
Denis Pombriant is a retired, board certified, medical technologist.
Understanding Elizabeth Holmes’ guilt is as easy or as difficult as knowing what a femtoliter (fL) is. It’s an impossibly small volume, 10–15 liters, for comparison a milliliter is 10–3 or one one-thousandth of a liter. A femtoliter is fivefold smaller. In medical testing it is the unit that describes the volume of a red blood cell. In humans the normal range for a red blood cell’s size is between 80 and 100 fL.
Red cells need to be that small because they must squeeze through narrow capillaries to bring oxygen to all the tissues of the body. They can be larger or smaller than that range, but those sizes often indicate pathology. That’s the reason we do medical laboratory testing — if you find the outliers, you find disease. Most of medicine and medical testing amounts to ruling things out.
In medical testing everything you can think of analyzing for has important parameters that are the knife’s edge between health and disease. Some tests measure a quantity or volume, others measure activity such as for a particular enzyme. Some testing happens in vitro, the autoanalyzer equivalent of a test tube, while other tests require a trained technician to view something under a microscope. You can learn a lot looking at a blood smear, urine sediment or even plain spit that way.
