HBO documentary film, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (2019); a true crime podcast, The Dropout; and a Hulu miniseries based on the podcast, The Dropout (2022). Early life Elizabeth Holmes was born February 3, 1984, in Washington, D.C. Her father, Christian Rasmus Holmes IV, was a vice president at Enron, an energy company that later went bankrupt after an accounting fraud scandal. Her mother, Noel Anne (née Daoust), worked as a Congressional committee staffer. Christian later held executive positions in government agencies such as USAID, the EPA, and USTDA. Christian is of part Danish ancestry. Her paternal great-great-great-grandfather was Charles Louis Fleischmann, a Hungarian immigrant who founded the Fleischmann's Yeast company. The Holmes family "was very proud of its yeast empire" history, according to a family friend Joseph Fuisz, "I think the parents very much yearned for the days of yore when the family was one of the richest in America. And I think Elizabeth channeled that, and at a young age." Her mother was born in Georgia and has French Canadian ancestry on her father's side. Holmes attended St. John's School in Houston. During high school, she was interested in computer programming and says she started her first business selling C++ compilers to Chinese universities. Her parents had arranged Mandarin Chinese home tutoring, and partway through high school, Holmes began attending Stanford University's summer Mandarin program. In 2002, Holmes attended Stanford, where she studied chemical engineering and worked as a student researcher and laboratory assistant in the School of Engineering. After the end of her freshman year, Holmes worked in a laboratory at the Genome Institute of Singapore and tested for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-1) through the collection of blood samples with syringes. She filed her first patent application on a wearable drug-delivery patch in 2003. Holmes reported that she was raped at Stanford in 2003.In March 2004, she dropped out of Stanford's School of Engineering and used her tuition money as seed funding for a consumer healthcare technology company. Theranos Founding In 2003, Holmes founded the company Real-Time Cures in Palo Alto, California, to "democratize healthcare". Holmes described her fear of needles as a motivation and sought to perform blood tests using only small amounts of blood. When Holmes pitched the idea to reap "vast amounts of data from a few droplets of blood derived from the tip of a finger" to her