American businesswoman Elizabeth Anne Holmes is the world’s youngest self-made billionaire. She is the founder and CEO of Theranos, a privately held blood test company that is presently under intense scrutiny. Holmes had 66 non-US patents and 18 US patents in her name. She is co-inventors of more than 100 patent applications.
Early Life and Education
Elizabeth Holmes was born in Washington, D.C. Early on she got inspired by her parents’ work in disaster relief to pursue science. When she was 9, she started a business of selling C++ compilers to Universities in China. In her childhood, she read the biography of Christian R. Holmes, her great-great-grandfather, who was an engineer, inventor, surgeon, and a World War I veteran. He was the head of the University Of Cincinnati College Of Medicine.
She graduated from St. John’s School in Houston and joined Stanford University to study chemical engineering. However, she started her company using her tuition money and left Stanford prior to getting her degree. She got inspired by her ancestor to take up medicine as her career, but soon she realized she had a fear of needles. Holmes inherited this fear from her mother and her grandmother, as they fainted at the sight of needles and blood. The fear of needles, further, proved to be one of her motivations to launch her diagnostics firm Theranos in 2003.
