In the biotech world, you can’t see everything

Earlier this week, I attended a screening of You Can See Everything, the buzzy new documentary about the disgraced former biotech CEO Elizabeth Holmes.

I went in not really knowing what to expect. I’d avoided spoilers (and won’t be giving anything away here, either!). I was wondering what new information this film could reveal, given how familiar many of us are with the Theranos story thanks to years of media coverage, the best-selling book Bad Blood, and the Hulu series The Dropout, starring Amanda Seyfried.

Like many others who have seen the film, I came away feeling unsettled. But not just about Holmes’s fraud and the somewhat disturbing interactions between the subjects. The film reignited a concern I’ve had about covering science for most of my career: Despite our best efforts, we never can actually see everything.

In case you’re rusty on the details, Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford University in 2003 to run Theranos, a diagnostics company she …