I decided it was time to convey to her that that wasn’t going to work.
“We do not consent to waiving our journalistic privileges,” I snapped back.
My retort seemed to have the desired effect. She turned more conciliatory and we started going through my questions one by one with the understanding that Daniel Young, as the only Theranos official present, would be the one answering them. However, we were soon at loggerheads again.
After Young acknowledged that Theranos owned commercial blood analyzers, which he claimed the company used only for comparison purposes, rather than for delivering patient results, I asked if one of them was the Siemens ADVIA. He declined to comment, citing trade secrets. I then asked whether Theranos ran small finger-stick samples on the Siemens ADVIA with a special dilution protocol. He again invoked trade secrets to avoid answering the question but argued that diluting blood samples was common in the lab industry.
From there, the discussion went in circles. These questions were at the heart of my story, I said. If they weren’t prepared to answer them, what was the point of our meeting? Boies replied that they were trying to be helpful but that they would not reveal what methods Theranos employed unless we signed nondisclosure agreements. Those were secrets Quest and LabCorp were desperately trying to find out by any means possible, including industrial espionage, he claimed.
As I continued to press for more substantive answers, Boies grew angry. He was suddenly no longer the amiable grandfatherly figure. He growled and flashed his teeth like an old grizzly bear. This was the David Boies who inspired fear in his courtroom adversaries, I thought to myself. He took a swipe at my reporting methods, saying I had asked some doctors loaded questions that were damaging to Theranos. That sparked a tense exchange between us. We stared each other down from across the table.
Jay Conti jumped in to defuse the situation but was soon sparring with King and Brille. Their argument took an almost farcical turn.
“It just feels like you want us to give you the formula for Coke in order to convince you that it doesn’t contain arsenic,” King said.
“Nobody’s asked for the formula for Coke!” Jay replied, annoyed.
More arguing ensued over the issue of what legitimately constituted a trade secret. How could anything involving a commercial analyzer manufactured by a third party possibly be deemed a Theranos trade secret? I asked. Brille replied unconvincingly that the distinction wasn’t as simple as I made it out to be.
We turned to my questions about the Edison. How many blood tests did Theranos perform on the device? That too was a trade secret, they said. I felt like I was watching a live performance of the Theater of the Absurd.
Did Theranos really have any new technology? I asked provocatively.
Boies’s temper flared again. Testing tiny finger-stick samples was something no one in the laboratory industry had been able to do before, he fumed. “Theranos is doing it and, unless it’s magic, it’s a new technology!”
“It sounds like the Wizard of Oz,” Jay quipped.
We continued going around in circles, never getting a straight answer about how many tests Theranos performed on the Edison versus commercial analyzers. It was frustrating but also a sign that I was on the right track. They wouldn’t be stonewalling if they had nothing to hide.
The meeting dragged on in this manner for four more hours. As we continued going through my list of questions, Young did answer some of them without invoking trade secrets. He acknowledged problems with Theranos’s potassium test but claimed they had quickly been solved and none of the faulty results had been released to any patients. Alan Beam had told me otherwise, so I suspected Young was lying about that. Young also confirmed that Theranos conducted proficiency testing differently than most laboratories but argued this was justified by the uniqueness of its technology. He also confirmed that the CLIA inspector hadn’t seen the Normandy part of Theranos’s lab during her inspection but claimed she had been informed of its existence.
One of his answers struck me as odd. When I brought up the Hematology Reports study Holmes had coauthored, Young immediately dismissed it as outdated. It had been conducted with older Theranos technology and its data were ancient, dating back to 2008, he said. Why then had Holmes cited it to The New Yorker? I wondered. It seemed Theranos was now distancing itself from it, probably because it was conscious of its flimsiness.
I asked