Elizabeth Holmes seems to know about as much about medical science as I do. When asked how her supposedly miraculous blood testing machine actually worked, her reply was, and I swear I’m not making this up, “A chemistry is performed so that a chemical reaction occurs and generates a signal from the chemical interaction with the sample, which is translated into a result, which is then reviewed by certified laboratory personnel.”

She also seems to have been the kind of boss who makes working at Monty Burns’s nuclear power plant sound like a good option. One of her employees wrote an email saying that Holmes ran her company Theranos “through fear and intimidation,” and that this not only made the company a miserable place to work but also made it impossible for the company to do what it was supposed to. It was the kind of work environment, the employee wrote, “where people hide things out of fear.”

And that’s what they said in an email to her. I’d encourage you to imagine what the workers said to each other, but Holmes seems to have ruthlessly prevented cross-departmental employee communication. There may never have been any scenario where she delivered on the outlandish promises she made for her machine, which she said would be able to take a single prick of blood and instantly process it for a thousand different codes. But Theranos might have been able to make some advances in blood testing if it had been the kind of workplace where engineers and chemists could talk to each other, and where people who brought up problems weren’t marched out of the building.