be hiding the relationship from her board. Why else would the New Yorker article have portrayed her as single, with Henry Kissinger telling the magazine that he and his wife had tried to fix her up on dates? If Holmes wasn’t forthright with her board about her relationship with Balwani, then what else might she be keeping from it?
Alan said he had raised his concerns about proficiency testing and the reliability of Theranos’s test results with Holmes and Balwani a number of times in person and by email. But Balwani would always either rebuff him or put him off, making sure to copy a Theranos lawyer on their email exchanges and to write, “Consider this attorney-client confidential.”
As the laboratory director whose name had been on the Theranos lab’s CLIA license, Alan was worried that he would be held personally responsible if there was ever a government investigation. To protect himself, he told me he’d forwarded dozens of his email exchanges with Balwani to his personal email account. But Theranos had found that out and threatened to sue him for breaching his confidentiality agreement.
What worried him even more than any personal liability he might face was the potential harm patients were being exposed to. He described the two nightmare scenarios false blood-test results could lead to. A false positive might cause a patient to have an unnecessary medical procedure. But a false negative was worse: a patient with a serious condition that went undiagnosed could die.
I hung up the phone feeling the familiar rush I got whenever I made a big reporting breakthrough and had to remind myself that this was just the first step in a long process. There was still a lot to understand and, above all, the story would require corroboration. There was no way the paper would take it with just one anonymous source, however good that source might be.
* * *
—
THE NEXT TIME Alan and I talked, I was standing in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park trying to stay warm while keeping a loose eye on my two boys, ages nine and eleven, as they horsed around with one of their friends. It was the last Saturday in what would go down in the record books as New York City’s coldest February in eighty-one years.
I had texted Alan after our first conversation to ask if he could think of former colleagues who might corroborate what he’d told me. He’d sent seven names, and I’d made contact with two of them. Both had been extremely nervous and had only agreed to talk on deep background. One of them, a former Theranos CLS, wouldn’t say much, but what she did say gave me confidence that I was on the right track: she told me she had been very troubled by what was going on at the company and concerned for patient safety. She’d resigned because she wasn’t comfortable having her name continue to appear on test results. The other was a former technical supervisor in the lab who’d said that Theranos operated under a culture of secrecy and fear.
I told Alan that I felt like I was beginning to make progress, which he seemed pleased to hear. I asked him whether he had kept the emails he’d forwarded to his personal Gmail account. My heart sank when he responded that his lawyer had made him delete them to comply with the affidavit the company made him sign. Documentary evidence was the gold standard for these types of stories. This would make my job much more difficult. I tried not to betray my disappointment.
Our conversation shifted to proficiency testing. Alan explained how Theranos was gaming it and he told me which commercial analyzers it used for the majority of its blood tests. Both were made by Siemens, confirming what Andrew Perlman, Phyllis Gardner’s husband, had heard from a Siemens sales representative during a flight. He revealed something else that hadn’t come up in our first call: Theranos’s lab was divided into two parts. One contained the commercial analyzers and the other the Edison devices. During her inspection of the lab, a state inspector had been shown only the part with the commercial analyzers. Alan felt she’d been deceived.
He also mentioned that Theranos was working on a newer-generation device code-named 4S that was supposed to supplant the Edison and do a broader variety of blood tests, but it didn’t work at all and was never deployed in the lab. Diluting finger-stick samples and running them on Siemens machines was supposed