U.S. FILES CRIMINAL CHARGES AGAINST THERANOS’ ELIZABETH HOLMES, RAMESH BALWANI.

Federal prosecutors filed criminal charges against Theranos Inc. founder Elizabeth Holmes and the blood-testing company’s former No. 2 executive, alleging that they defrauded investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars and also defrauded doctors and patients.

The indictments of Ms. Holmes and Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, Theranos’s former president and chief operating officer who was also Ms. Holmes’s boyfriend, are the culmination of a 2½-year investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office in San Francisco, sparked by articles in The Wall Street Journal that raised questions about the company’s technology and practices.

The article is by the Wall Street Journal’s John Carreyrou, whom Nick Gillespie recently interviewed for Reason TV, in a segment titled, “Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, and the Cult of Silicon Valley.” Carreyrou, who has written extensively about Theranos and its founder for the Journal, is author of the new book, Bad Blood: Secrecy and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, “which has made the New York Times bestseller list and will soon be made into a movie starring Jennifer Lawrence as Elizabeth Holmes. Bad Blood raises tough questions about regulators’ failure to stop Theranos, the infatuation of the public and the press with the mystique of Silicon Valley, and the shadowlands where innovation, capitalism, and deception meet:”