You can be forgiven if, several years ago, you glossed over headlines about a small Silicon Valley blood-testing company you had never heard of.

Back in 2015, when Theranos began tumbling from its zenith, a lot of urgent and tragic news stories vied for popular attention: plane crashes, terror attacks, police shootings—to say nothing of the tumultuous presidential race in its early stages. Compared with all that, the Theranos drama might have seemed like the ordinary saga of another tech company, full of energy and hype, that overpromised and underdelivered. Its fall wasn’t among the year’s top stories and shouldn’t have been.