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NRO by SteveM

That is the National Reconnaissance Office, an organization whose very name was classified when I graduated from Notre Dame.

Towards the end of my academic days, I was part of a research program funded by the NRO. That was a unique and bizarre experience. However, their primary rule for funding was,

"We are willing to take extreme engineering risks, however we will not take scientific risk."

That was primarily there to weed out the kooks who thought they had come up with a way for time travel, but it reflects a fundamental point relevant here: There is a difference between engineering and science. Based on what I have read, the fundamental science of what she proposed to do was impossible.

The anatomy/physiology/biochemistry/whatever of blood circulation prevented it from working. There is no way around that no matter how much money you spend or how much effort you put into it. Discerning "science" form "engineering" is probably one of the hardest things that researchers have to deal with, at least on the engineering side. The involvement of scientific experts on the Board of Directors of Theranos may have helped stop this early on; whether her exclusion of them was done on purpose, or was by accident, we will probably find out during her criminal trial.