to be a temporary solution, but it had become a permanent one because the 4S had turned into a fiasco.
It was all beginning to make sense: Holmes and her company had overpromised and then cut corners when they couldn’t deliver. It was one thing to do that with software or a smartphone app, but doing it with a medical product that people relied on to make important health decisions was unconscionable. Toward the end of this second phone conversation, Alan mentioned something else I found of interest: George Shultz, the former secretary of state who was a Theranos board member, had a grandson named Tyler who had worked at the company. Alan wasn’t sure why Tyler had left but he didn’t think it was on good terms. I was jotting things down in the Notes app of my iPhone and added Tyler’s name as another potential source.
* * *
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OVER THE NEXT few weeks, I made some more progress but I also encountered some complications. In my quest to corroborate what Alan was telling me, I contacted more than twenty current and former Theranos employees. Many didn’t reply to my calls and emails. The few that I managed to get on the phone told me they had signed ironclad confidentiality agreements and didn’t want to risk being sued for violating them.
One former high-ranking lab employee did agree to talk to me but only off the record. This was an important journalistic distinction: Alan and the other two former employees had agreed to speak to me on deep background, which meant I could use what they told me while keeping their identities confidential. Off the record meant I couldn’t make any use of the information. The conversation was nonetheless helpful because this source confirmed a lot of what Alan had told me, giving me the confidence to forge on. He summed up what was going on at the company with an analogy: “The way Theranos is operating is like trying to build a bus while you’re driving the bus. Someone is going to get killed.”
A few days later, Alan got back in touch with some good news. I had asked him to call the Washington, D.C., whistleblower law firm he’d reached out to in the fall to see if he could retrieve the email exchange with Balwani he had sent to it. The firm had just complied with his request. Alan forwarded the exchange to me. It was a chain of eighteen emails about proficiency testing between Sunny Balwani, Daniel Young, Mark Pandori, and Alan. It showed Balwani angrily admonishing Alan and Mark Pandori for running the proficiency-testing samples on the Edison and reluctantly acknowledging that the device had “failed” the test. Moreover, it left no doubt that Holmes knew about the incident: she was copied on most of the emails.
This was another step forward, but it was soon followed by a step backward. In late March, Alan got cold feet. He stood by everything he’d told me, but he no longer wanted to be involved with the story going forward. He couldn’t stomach the risks anymore. Talking to me gave him palpitations and distracted him from his new job, he said. I tried to get him to change his mind but he was resolute, so I decided to give him some space and hoped he would eventually come around.
Although it was a big setback, I was slowly making headway on other fronts. Wanting a neutral opinion from a lab expert about Theranos’s dilution of blood samples and the way it conducted proficiency testing, I called Timothy Hamill, vice chairman of the University of California, San Francisco’s Department of Laboratory Medicine. Tim confirmed to me that both practices were highly questionable. He also explained the pitfalls of using blood pricked from a finger. Unlike venous blood drawn from the arm, capillary blood was polluted by fluids from tissues and cells that interfered with tests and made measurements less accurate. “I’d be less surprised if they told us they were time travelers who came back from the twenty-seventh century than if they told us they cracked that nut,” he said.
Before his change of heart, Alan had mentioned a nurse in Arizona named Carmen Washington who worked at a clinic owned by Walgreens and had complained about Theranos’s blood tests. After trying to track her down for several weeks, I finally got her on the phone. She told me three of her patients had received questionable results from the company. One was