- Carreyrou, John.
Bad Blood.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018.
ISBN 978-1-9848-3363-1.
-
The drawing of blood for laboratory tests is one of my least
favourite parts of a routine visit to the doctor's office. Now,
I have no fear of needles and hardly notice the stick, but
frequently the doctor's assistant who draws the blood (whom I've
nicknamed Vampira) has difficulty finding the vein to get a good
flow and has to try several times. On one occasion she made an
internal puncture which resulted in a huge, ugly bruise that
looked like I'd slammed a car door on my arm. I wondered why
they need so much blood, and why draw it into so many
different containers? (Eventually, I researched this, having
been intrigued by the issue during the O. J. Simpson trial; if
you're curious,
here
is the information.) Then, after the blood is drawn, it
has to be sent off to the laboratory, which sends back
the results days later. If something pops up in the test
results, you have to go back for a second visit with
the doctor to discuss it.
Wouldn't it be great if they could just
stick
a fingertip and draw a drop or two of blood, as is
done by diabetics to test blood sugar, then run all the tests on
it? Further, imagine if, after taking the drop of blood, it
could be put into a desktop machine right in the doctor's office
which would, in a matter of minutes, produce test results you
could discuss immediately with the doctor. And if such a
technology existed and followed the history of decline in price
with increase in volume which has characterised other high
technology products since the 1970s, it might be possible to
deploy the machines into the homes of patients being treated
with medications so their effects could be monitored and relayed
directly to their physicians in case an anomaly was detected.
It wouldn't quite be a Star Trek medical
tricorder,
but it would be one step closer. With the cost of medical care
rising steeply, automating diagnostic blood tests and bringing
them to the mass market seemed an excellent candidate as the
“next big thing” for Silicon Valley to
revolutionise.
This was the vision that came to 19 year old Elizabeth
Holmes after completing a summer internship at the Genome
Institute of Singapore after her freshman year as a
chemical engineering major at Stanford. Holmes had
decided on a career in entrepreneurship from an early
age and, after her first semester told her father,
“No, Dad, I'm, not interested in getting a Ph.D.
I want to make money.” And Stanford, in the heart
of Silicon Valley, was surrounded by companies started
by professors and graduates who had turned inventions
into vast fortunes. With only one year of college behind
her, she was sure she'd found her opportunity. She showed
the patent application she'd drafted for an arm patch
that would diagnose medical conditions to Channing
Robertson, professor of chemical engineering at
Stanford, and Shaunak Roy, the Ph.D. student in whose lab
she had worked as an assistant during her freshman
year. Robertson was enthusiastic, and when Holmes said
she intended to leave Stanford and start a company to
commercialise the idea, he encouraged her. When the company
was incorporated in 2004, Roy, then a newly-minted Ph.D.,
became its first employee and Robertson joined the board.
From the outset, the company was funded by other people's
money. Holmes persuaded a family friend, Tim Draper, a
second-generation venture capitalist who had backed, among other
companies, Hotmail, to invest US$ 1 million in first round
funding. Draper was soon joined by Victor Palmieri, a corporate
turnaround artist and friend of Holmes' father. The company was
named Theranos, from “therapy” and
“diagnosis”. Elizabeth, unlike this scribbler, had
a lifelong aversion to needles, and the invention she described
in the business plan pitched to investors was informed by this.
A skin patch would draw tiny quantities of blood without pain by
means of “micro-needles”, the blood would be
analysed by micro-miniaturised sensors in the patch and, if
needed, medication could be injected. A wireless data link
would send results to the doctor.
This concept, and Elizabeth's enthusiasm and high-energy pitch
allowed her to recruit additional investors, raising almost US$
6 million in 2004. But there were some who failed to be
persuaded: MedVentures Associates, a firm that specialised in
medical technology, turned her down after discovering she had no
answers for the technical questions raised in a meeting with the
partners, who had in-depth experience with diagnostic
technology. This would be a harbinger of the company's
fund-raising in the future: in its entire history, not a single
venture fund or investor with experience in medical or
diagnostic technology would put money into the company.
Shaunak Roy, who, unlike Holmes, actually knew something about
chemistry, quickly realised that Elizabeth's concept, while
appealing to the uninformed, was science fiction, not science,
and no amount of arm-waving about nanotechnology, microfluidics,
or laboratories on a chip would suffice to build something which
was far beyond the state of the art. This led to a
“de-scoping” of the company's ambition—the
first of many which would happen over succeeding years. Instead
of Elizabeth's magical patch, a small quantity of blood would be
drawn from a finger stick and placed into a cartridge around the
size of a credit card. The disposable cartridge would then be
placed into a desktop “reader” machine, which would,
using the blood and reagents stored in the cartridge, perform a
series of analyses and report the results. This was originally
called Theranos 1.0, but after a series of painful redesigns,
was dubbed the “Edison”. This was the prototype
Theranos ultimately showed to potential customers and
prospective investors.
This was a far cry from the original ambitious concept.
The hundreds of laboratory tests doctors can order
are divided into four major categories: immunoassays,
general chemistry, hæmatology, and DNA amplification.
In immunoassay tests, blood plasma is exposed to
an antibody that detects the presence of a substance
in the plasma. The antibody contains a marker which
can be detected by its effect on light passed through
the sample. Immunoassays are used in a number of common
blood tests, such the
25(OH)D
assay used to test for vitamin D deficiency, but cannot perform
other frequently ordered tests such as blood sugar and red and
white blood cell counts. Edison could only perform what is
called “chemiluminescent immunoassays”, and thus
could only perform a fraction of the tests regularly ordered.
The rationale for installing an Edison in the doctor's office
was dramatically reduced if it could only do some tests but
still required a venous blood draw be sent off to the laboratory
for the balance.
This didn't deter Elizabeth, who combined her formidable
salesmanship with arm-waving about the capabilities of the
company's products. She was working on a deal to sell four
hundred Edisons to the Mexican government to cope with an
outbreak of swine flu, which would generate immediate revenue.
Money was much on the minds of Theranos' senior management. By
the end of 2009, the company had burned through the US$ 47
million raised in its first three rounds of funding and, without
a viable product or prospects for sales, would have difficulty
keeping the lights on.
But the real bonanza loomed on the horizon in 2010. Drugstore
giant Walgreens was interested in expanding their retail
business into the “wellness market”: providing
in-store health services to their mass market clientèle.
Theranos pitched them on offering in-store blood testing.
Doctors could send their patients to the local Walgreens to have
their blood tested from a simple finger stick and eliminate the
need to draw blood in the office or deal with laboratories.
With more than 8,000 locations in the U.S., if each were to be
equipped with one Edison, the revenue to Theranos (including the
single-use testing cartridges) would put them on the map as
another Silicon Valley disruptor that went from zero to hundreds
of millions in revenue overnight. But here, as well, the
Elizabeth effect was in evidence. Of the 192 tests she told
Walgreens Theranos could perform, fewer than half were
immunoassays the Edisons could run. The rest could be done only
on conventional laboratory equipment, and certainly not on a
while-you-wait basis.
Walgreens wasn't the only potential saviour on the horizon.
Grocery godzilla Safeway, struggling with sales and earnings
which seemed to have reached a peak, saw in-store blood testing
with Theranos machines as a high-margin profit centre. They
loaned Theranos US$ 30 million and began to plan for
installation of blood testing clinics in their stores.
But there was a problem, and as the months wore on, this became
increasingly apparent to people at both Walgreens and Safeway,
although dismissed by those in senior management under the spell
of Elizabeth's reality distortion field. Deadlines were missed.
Simple requests, such as A/B comparison tests run on the
Theranos hardware and at conventional labs were first refused,
then postponed, then run but results not disclosed. The list of
tests which could be run, how blood for them would be drawn, and
how they would be processed seemed to dissolve into fog whenever
specific requests were made for this information, which was
essential for planning the in-store clinics.
There was, indeed, a problem, and it was pretty severe,
especially for a start-up which had burned through US$ 50
million and sold nothing. The product didn't work.
Not only could the Edison only run a fraction of the tests its
prospective customers had been led by Theranos to believe it
could, for those it did run the results were wildly unreliable.
The small quantity of blood used in the test introduced random
errors due to dilution of the sample; the small tubes in the
cartridge were prone to clogging; and capillary blood collected
from a finger stick was prone to errors due to
“hemolysis”, the rupture of red blood cells, which
is minimal in a venous blood draw but so prevalent in finger
stick blood it could lead to some tests producing values which
indicated the patient was dead.
Meanwhile, people who came to work at Theranos quickly became
aware that it was not a normal company, even by the eccentric
standards of Silicon Valley. There was an obsession with
security, with doors opened by badge readers; logging of
employee movement; information restricted to narrow silos
prohibiting collaboration between, say, engineering and
marketing which is the norm in technological start-ups;
monitoring of employee Internet access, E-mail, and social media
presence; a security detail of menacing-looking people in black
suits and earpieces (which eventually reached a total of
twenty); a propensity of people, even senior executives, to
“vanish”, Stalin-era purge-like, overnight; and a
climate of fear that anybody, employee or former employee, who
spoke about the company or its products to an outsider,
especially the media, would be pursued, harassed, and bankrupted
by lawsuits. There aren't many start-ups whose senior
scientists are summarily demoted and subsequently commit
suicide. That happened at Theranos. The company held no
memorial for him.
Throughout all of this, a curious presence in the company was
Ramesh (“Sunny”) Balwani, a Pakistani-born software
engineer who had made a fortune of more than US$ 40 million in
the dot-com boom and cashed out before the bust. He joined
Theranos in late 2009 as Elizabeth's second in command and
rapidly became known as a hatchet man, domineering boss, and
clueless when it came to the company's key technologies (on one
occasion, an engineer mentioned a robotic arm's “end
effector”, after which Sunny would frequently speak of its
“endofactor”). Unbeknownst to employees and
investors, Elizabeth and Sunny had been living together since
2005. Such an arrangement would be a major scandal in a public
company, but even in a private firm, concealing such information
from the board and investors is a serious breach of trust.
Let's talk about the board, shall we? Elizabeth was not only
persuasive, but well-connected. She would parley one connection
into another, and before long had recruited many prominent
figures including:
- George Schultz (former U.S. Secretary of State)
- Henry Kissinger (former U.S. Secretary of State)
- Bill Frist (former U.S. Senator and medical doctor)
- James Mattis (General, U.S. Marine Corps)
- Riley Bechtel (Chairman and former CEO, Bechtel Group)
- Sam Nunn (former U.S. Senator)
- Richard Kobacevich (former Wells Fargo chairman and CEO)
Later, super-lawyer David Boies would join the board, and lead
its attacks against the company's detractors. It is notable
that, as with its investors, not a single board member had
experience in medical or diagnostic technology. Bill Frist was
an M.D., but his speciality was heart and lung transplants, not
laboratory tests.
By 2014, Elizabeth Holmes had come onto the media radar.
Photogenic, articulate, and with a story of high-tech disruption
of an industry much in the news, she began to be featured as the
“female Steve Jobs”, which must have pleased her,
since she affected black turtlenecks, kale shakes, and even
a car with no license plates to emulate her role model. She
appeared on the cover of Fortune in January 2014,
made the Forbes list of 400 most wealthy shortly
thereafter, was featured in puff pieces in business and general
market media, and was named by Time as one of the
hundred most influential people in the world. The year 2014
closed with another glowing profile in the New
Yorker. This would be the beginning of the end, as it
happened to be read by somebody who actually knew something
about blood testing.
Adam Clapper, a pathologist in Missouri, spent his spare time
writing Pathology Blawg, with a readership of
practising pathologists. Clapper read what Elizabeth was
claiming to do with a couple of drops of blood from a finger
stick and it didn't pass the sniff test. He wrote a sceptical
piece on his blog and, as it passed from hand to hand, he became
a lightning rod for others dubious of Theranos' claims,
including those with direct or indirect experience with the
company. Earlier, he had helped a Wall Street
Journal reporter comprehend the tangled web of medical
laboratory billing, and he decided to pass on the tip to the
author of this book.
Thus began the unravelling of one of the greatest scams and
scandals in the history of high technology, Silicon Valley, and
venture investing. At the peak, privately-held Theranos was
valued at around US$ 9 billion, with Elizabeth Holmes holding
around half of its common stock, and with one of those
innovative capital structures of which Silicon Valley is so
fond, 99.7% of the voting rights. Altogether, over its history,
the company raised around US$ 900 million from investors
(including US$ 125 million from Rupert Murdoch in the US$ 430
million final round of funding). Most of the investors' money
was ultimately spent on legal fees as the whole fairy castle
crumbled.
The story of the decline and fall is gripping, involving the
grandson of a Secretary of State, gumshoes following
whistleblowers and reporters, what amounts to legal terrorism by
the ever-slimy David Boies, courageous people who stood their
ground in the interest of scientific integrity against enormous
personal and financial pressure, and the saga of one of the most
cunning and naturally talented confidence women ever, equipped
with only two semesters of freshman chemical engineering, who
managed to raise and blow through almost a billion dollars of
other people's money without checking off the first box on the
conventional start-up check list: “Build the
product”.
I have, in my career, met three world-class con men. Three
times, I (just barely) managed to pick up the warning signs and
beg my associates to walk away. Each time I was ignored. After
reading this book, I am absolutely sure that had Elizabeth
Holmes pitched me on Theranos (about which I never heard before
the fraud began to be exposed), I would have been taken in.
Walker's law is “Absent evidence to the contrary, assume
everything is a scam”. A corollary is “No matter
how cautious you are, there's always a confidence man (or woman)
who can scam you if you don't do your homework.”
Here is Elizabeth Holmes at Stanford in 2013, when Theranos was
riding high and she was doing her “female Steve
Jobs” act.
Elizabeth
Holmes at Stanford: 2013
This is a CNN piece, filmed after the Theranos scam had begun to
collapse, in which you can still glimpse the Elizabeth Holmes
reality distortion field at full intensity directed at CNN
medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta. There are several curious
things about this video. The machine that Gupta is shown is the
“miniLab”, a prototype second-generation machine
which never worked acceptably, not the Edison, which was
actually used in the Walgreens and Safeway tests. Gupta's blood
is drawn and tested, but the process used to perform the test is
never shown. The result reported is a cholesterol test, but the
Edison cannot perform such tests. In the plans for the
Walgreens and Safeway roll-outs, such tests were performed
on purchased Siemens analysers which had been secretly hacked by
Theranos to work with blood diluted well below their
regulatory-approved specifications (the dilution was required
due to the small volume of blood from the finger stick). Since
the miniLab never really worked, the odds are that Gupta's blood
was tested on one of the Siemens machines, not a Theranos
product at all.
CNN:
Inside the Theranos Lab (2016)
In a June 2018 interview, author John Carreyrou recounts the
story of Theranos and his part in revealing the truth.
John
Carreyrou on investigating Theranos (2018)
If you are a connoisseur of the art of the con, here is a
masterpiece. After the Wall Street Journal
exposé had broken, after retracting tens of thousands of
blood tests, and after Theranos had been banned from running a
clinical laboratory by its regulators, Holmes got up before an
audience of 2500 people at the meeting of the American
Association of Clinical Chemistry and turned up the reality
distortion field to eleven. Watch a master at work. She comes
on the stage at the six minute mark.
Elizabeth
Holmes at the American Association of Clinical Chemistry (2016)
- Neovictorian [pseud.] and Neal Van Wahr.
Sanity.
Seattle: Amazon Digital Services, [2017] 2018.
ISBN 978-1-9808-2095-6.
-
Have you sometimes felt, since an early age, that you were
an alien, somehow placed on Earth and observing the antics
of humans as if they were a different species? Why do they
believe such stupid things? Why do they do such
dumb things? Any why do they keep doing them over and
over again seemingly incapable of learning from the bad
outcomes of all the previous attempts?
That is how Cal Adler felt since childhood and, like most people
with such feelings, kept them quiet and bottled up while trying
to get ahead in a game whose rules often seemed absurd. In his
senior year in high school, he encounters a substitute guidance
counsellor who tells him, without any preliminary conversation,
precisely how he feels. He's assured he is not alone, and that
over time he will meet others. He is given an enigmatic contact
in case of emergency. He is advised, as any alien in a strange
land, to blend in while observing and developing his own
talents. And that's the last he sees of the counsellor.
Cal's subsequent life is punctuated by singular events: a
terrorist incident in which he spontaneously rises to the
occasion, encountering extraordinary people, and being initiated
into skills he never imagined he'd possess. He begins to put
together a picture of a shadowy…something…of
which he may or may not be a part, whose goals are unclear, but
whose people are extraordinary.
Meanwhile, a pop religion called ReHumanism, founded by a science
fiction writer, is gaining adherents among prominent figures
in business, entertainment, and technology. Its “scriptures”
advocate escape from the tragic cycle of progress and collapse
which has characterised the human experience by turning away from
the artificial environment in which we have immersed ourselves
and rediscovering our inherent human nature which may, to many
in the modern world, seem alien. Is there a connection between
ReHumanism (which seems like a flaky scam to Cal) and the
mysterious people he is encountering?
All of these threads begin to come together when Cal, working
as a private investigator in Reno, Nevada, is retained by the
daughter of a recently-deceased billionaire industrialist to
find her mother, who has disappeared during a tourist visit to
Alaska. The mother is revealed have become a convert to
and supporter of ReHumanism. Are they involved? And how
did the daughter find Cal, who, after previous events, has
achieved a level of low observability stealth aircraft
designers can only dream of?
An adventure begins in which nothing is as it seems and all
of Cal's formidable talents are tested to their limits.
This is an engaging and provocative mystery/thriller which will
resonate with those who identify with the kind of heroic,
independent, and inner-directed characters that populate the
fiction of Robert A. Heinlein and other writers of the golden
age of science fiction. It speaks directly to those sworn to
chart their own course through life regardless of what others
may think or say. I'm not sure the shadowy organisation we
glimpse here actually exists, but I wish it did…and I
wish they'd contacted me. There are many tips of the hat here
to works and authors of fiction with similar themes, and I'm
sure many more I missed.
This is an example of the efflorescence of independent science
fiction which the obsolescence of the traditional gatekeeper
publishers has engendered. With the advent of low-cost,
high-margin self-publishing and customer reviews and ratings to
evaluate quality, an entire new cohort of authors whose work
would never before have seen the light of day is now enriching
the genre and the lives of their enthusiastic readers. The work
is not free of typographical and grammatical errors, but I've
read books from major science fiction publishers with more. The
Kindle edition is free to Kindle
Unlimited subscribers.
- Verne, Jules.
Une Fantaisie du Docteur Ox.
Seattle: CreateSpace, [1874] 2017.
ISBN 978-1-5470-6408-3.
-
After reading and reviewing
Jules Verne's
Hector Servadac last
year, I stumbled upon a phenomenal bargain: a Kindle edition of the
complete works of Jules Verne—160 titles, with
5400 illustrations—for US$ 2.51 at this writing, published
by Arvensa. This is not a cheap public domain knock-off, but
a thoroughly professional publication with very few errors.
For less than the price of a paperback book, you get just about
everything Jules Verne ever wrote in Kindle format which, if you
download the free Kindle French dictionary, allows you to
quickly look up the obscure terms and jargon of which Verne is
so fond without flipping through the
Little Bob. That's
how I read this work, although I have cited a print edition
in the header for those who prefer such.
The strange story of Doctor Ox would be considered a
novella in
modern publishing terms, coming in at 19,240 words. It is
divided into 17 chapters and is written in much the same
style as the author's
Voyages
extraordinaires, with his customary huge
vocabulary, fondness for lengthy enumerations, and witty
parody of the national character of foreigners.
Here, the foreigners in question are the Flemish, speakers
of dialects of the Dutch language who live in the northern
part of Belgium. The Flemish are known for being phlegmatic,
and nowhere is this more in evidence than the small city of
Quiquendone. Its 2,393 residents and their ancestors have
lived there since the city was founded in 1197, and very
little has happened to disturb their placid lives; they like
it that way. Its major industries are the manufacture of
whipped cream and barley sugar. Its inhabitants are taciturn
and, when they speak, do so slowly. For centuries, what
little government they require has been provided by generations
of the van Tricasse family, son succeeding father as burgomaster.
There is little for the burgomaster to do, and one of
the few items on his agenda, inherited from his father
twenty years ago, is whether the city should dispense with
the services of its sole policeman, who hasn't had anything
to do for decades.
Burgomaster van Tricasse exemplifies the moderation in all
things of the residents of his city. I cannot resist quoting
this quintessentially Jules Verne description in full.
Le bourgmestre était un personnage de cinquante ans, ni
gras ni maigre, ni petit ni grand, ni vieux ni jeune, ni
coloré ni pâle, ni gai ni triste, ni content ni
ennuyé, ni énergique ni mou, ni fier ni humble, ni
bon ni méchant, ni généreux ni avare, ni
brave ni poltron, ni trop ni trop peu, — ne quid nimis, — un homme
modéré en tout ; mais à la lenteur
invariable de ses mouvements, à sa mâchoire
inférieure un peu pendante, à sa paupière
supérieure immuablement relevée, à son
front uni comme une plaque de cuivre jaune et sans une ride,
à ses muscles peu salliants, un physionomiste eût
sans peine reconnu que le bourgomestre van Tricasse était
le flegme personnifié.
Imagine how startled this paragon of moderation and peace
must have been when the city's policeman—he whose
job has been at risk for decades—pounds on the door
and, when admitted, reports that the city's doctor and
lawyer, visiting the house of scientist Doctor Ox, had
gotten into an argument. They had been talking
politics! Such a thing had not happened in
Quiquendone in over a century. Words were exchanged
that might lead to a duel!
Who is this Doctor Ox? A recent arrival in Quiquendone,
he is a celebrated scientist, considered a leader in the
field of physiology. He stands out against the other
inhabitants of the city. Of no well-defined nationality,
he is a genuine eccentric, self-confident, ambitious, and
known even to smile in public. He and his laboratory
assistant Gédéon Ygène work on
their experiments and never speak of them to others.
Shortly after arriving in Quiquendone, Dr Ox approached the
burgomaster and city council with a proposal: to illuminate
the city and its buildings, not with the new-fangled electric
lights which other cities were adopting, but with a new
invention of his own, oxy-hydric gas. Using powerful
electric batteries he invented, water would be decomposed
into hydrogen and oxygen gas, stored separately, then
delivered in parallel pipes to individual taps where they
would be combined and burned, producing a light much brighter
and pure than electric lights, not to mention conventional
gaslights burning natural or manufactured gas. In storage
and distribution, hydrogen and oxygen would be strictly
segregated, as any mixing prior to the point of use ran the
risk of an explosion. Dr Ox offered to pay all of the
expenses of building the gas production plant, storage
facilities, and installation of the underground pipes and
light fixtures in public buildings and private residences.
After a demonstration of oxy-hydric lighting, city fathers
gave the go-ahead for the installation, presuming Dr Ox was
willing to assume all the costs in order to demonstrate his
invention to other potential customers.
Over succeeding days and weeks, things before unimagined,
indeed, unimaginable begin to occur. On a visit to
Dr Ox, the burgomaster himself and his best friend
city council president Niklausse find themselves in—dare
it be said—a political argument. At
the opera house, where musicians and singers usually so
moderate the tempo that works are performed over multiple
days, one act per night, a performance of Meyerbeer's
Les Hugenots
becomes frenetic and incites the audience to what
can only be described as a riot. A ball at the house of
the banker becomes a whirlwind of sound and motion.
And yet, each time, after people go home, they return to
normal and find it difficult to believe what they did
the night before.
Over time, the phenomenon, at first only seen in large
public gatherings, begins to spread into individual homes
and private lives. You would think the placid Flemish
had been transformed into the hotter tempered denizens of
countries to the south. Twenty newspapers spring up, each
advocating its own radical agenda. Even plants start growing
to enormous size, and cats and dogs, previously as reserved
as their masters, begin to bare fangs and claws. Finally,
a mass movement rises to avenge the honour of
Quiquendone for an injury committed in the year 1185 by
a cow from the neighbouring town of Virgamen.
What was happening? Whence the madness? What would be the
result when the citizens of Quiquendone, armed with everything
they could lay their hands on, marched upon their neighbours?
This is a classic “puzzle story”, seasoned with a
mad scientist of whom the author allows us occasional candid
glimpses as the story unfolds. You'll probably solve the puzzle
yourself long before the big reveal at the end. Jules Verne,
always anticipating the future, foresaw this: the penultimate
chapter is titled (my translation), “Where the intelligent
reader sees that he guessed correctly, despite every precaution
by the author”. The enjoyment here is not so much the
puzzle but rather Verne's language and delicious description
of characters and events, which are up to the standard of his
better-known works.
This is “minor Verne”, written originally for a
public reading and then published in a newspaper in Amiens,
his adopted home. Many believed that in Quiquendone he
was satirising Amiens and his placid neighbours.
Doctor Ox would reappear in the work of Jules Verne in
his 1882 play Voyage
à travers l'impossible
(Journey
Through the Impossible), a work which, after 97
performances in Paris, was believed lost until a single
handwritten manuscript was found in 1978. Dr Ox reprises his
role as mad scientist, joining other characters from Verne's
novels on their own extraordinary voyages. After that work,
Doctor Ox disappears from the world. But when I regard the
frenzied serial madness loose today, from “bathroom
equality”, tearing down Civil War monuments, masked
“Antifa” blackshirts beating up people in the
streets, the “refugee” racket, and Russians under
every bed, I sometimes wonder if he's taken up residence in
today's United States.
An English translation is available.
Verne's reputation has often suffered due to poor English
translations of his work; I have not read this edition and don't
know how good it is. Warning: the description of this book
at Amazon contains a huge spoiler for the central puzzle of
the story.