Like Alan, she felt the state inspector had been misled. She told me lab members had been under explicit orders not to enter or exit Normandy during the inspection and that the door leading down to it had been kept locked. She also told me about her friendship with Tyler and about the dinner she’d attended at George Shultz’s house the night Tyler had resigned. Like Tyler, she was appalled by the lack of scientific rigor that had gone into validating the assays on the Edisons. She said Theranos should never have gone live testing patient samples. The company routinely ignored quality-control failures and test errors and showed a complete disregard for the well-being of patients, she said. In the end, she had resigned because she was sickened by what she had become a party to, she told me. These were strong words, and it was clear from how distraught Erika was that she meant them.
The next day, I drove to Mountain View, home to Google’s headquarters, and met Tyler at a beer garden called Steins. It was early evening and the place was packed with young Silicon Valley professionals enjoying happy hour. We couldn’t find seats, so we stood around a wooden beer barrel on the terrace outside and used it as a table. Over a pint of cold ale, Tyler gave me a more detailed account of his time at Theranos, including the frantic call from his mother relaying Holmes’s threat the day he resigned and his and Erika’s attempts to talk sense into George Shultz that evening. He had tried to follow his parents’ advice and to put the whole thing behind him but he’d found himself unable to.
I asked him whether he thought his grandfather was still loyal to Holmes. Yes, there was little doubt in his mind that he was, he replied. When I asked him what made him think that, he revealed a new anecdote. The Shultz family tradition was to celebrate Thanksgiving at the former secretary of state’s home. When Tyler, his brother, and his parents had arrived at his grandfather’s house that day, they’d come face-to-face with Holmes and her parents. George had invited them too. A mere seven months had passed since Tyler’s resignation and the wounds were still fresh, but he had been forced to act as if nothing had happened. The awkward dinner conversation had drifted from California’s drought to the bulletproof windows in the new Theranos headquarters. For Tyler, the most excruciating moment had been when Holmes got up and gave a toast expressing her love and appreciation for every member of the Shultz family. He said he’d barely been able to contain himself.
Tyler and Erika were both very young and had been junior employees at Theranos, but I found them credible as sources because so much of what they told me corroborated what Alan Beam had said. I was also impressed by their sense of ethics. They felt strongly that what they had witnessed was wrong and were willing to take the risk of speaking to me to right that wrong.
I next met up with Phyllis Gardner, the Stanford medical school professor Holmes had consulted about her original patch idea when she’d dropped out of college twelve years earlier. Phyllis gave me a tour of the Stanford campus and its surroundings. As we drove around in her car, I was struck by how small and insular Palo Alto was. Phyllis’s home was just down the hill from George Shultz’s big shingled house, and both were on land owned by Stanford. When Phyllis walked her dog, she sometimes ran into Channing Robertson. The Hoover Institution building where George Shultz and the other Theranos board members had offices was right in the middle of the campus. The new Theranos headquarters on Page Mill Road was less than two miles away on land that was also owned by Stanford. In a strange twist, Phyllis told me the site used to be a Wall Street Journal printing plant.
On the last day of my trip, I met Rochelle Gibbons for lunch at Rangoon Ruby, a Burmese restaurant in Palo Alto. It had been two years since Ian had died, but Rochelle was still grieving and struggled to hold back tears. She blamed Theranos for his death and wished he had never worked there. She provided a copy of the doctor’s note a Theranos attorney had encouraged Ian to use to avoid being deposed in the Fuisz case. The time stamp on