II. After initially being detained in a POW camp in Italy, he had been marched across Europe to a different camp in Poland, where he was liberated at the end of the war.
The conversation eventually drifted back to the here and now and to Theranos. Tony, who like Ian no longer had Elizabeth’s favor and was being excluded from the development of the miniLab, floated the notion that perhaps the company was just a vehicle for Elizabeth and Sunny’s romance and that none of the work they did really mattered.
Ian nodded. “It’s a folie à deux,” he said.
Tony didn’t know any French, so he left to go look up the expression in the dictionary. The definition he found struck him as apt: “The presence of the same or similar delusional ideas in two persons closely associated with one another.”
After the move to the old Facebook building, Ian grew more sullen. He was relegated to a desk in the general population of employees with his back facing a wall. It was a symbol of how unimportant he’d become.
One day, the engineer Tom Brumett ran into him at Fish Market, a seafood restaurant on El Camino Real where he was meeting a friend. As they stood in line waiting for a table, Ian asked if he could join them. Tom and Ian were both in their mid-sixties and had established a friendly rapport. The first time they’d interacted was shortly after Tom came to work at Theranos in 2010. Upset that Sunny and other managers were disregarding his opinion during a discussion about what sort of engineering personnel should be hired to assist him, Tom had walked out of the meeting in a huff with thoughts of quitting. Ian had come running after him and assured him that his opinion did matter—a gesture Tom had greatly appreciated.
Over the next two years, Tom had noticed Ian’s growing gloom. As they sat down for lunch at Fish Market, Tom wondered whether Ian had followed him there. Most Theranos employees ate the food Elizabeth and Sunny had catered and didn’t leave the office during the day. What’s more, the restaurant wasn’t near the office and Ian had walked in just a minute or two after him. Ian had probably hoped to catch him alone, Tom thought. He seemed desperate for someone to talk to. But Tom was there to reconnect with his friend, a salesman for a Japanese chipmaker. They tried to include Ian in the conversation, but he remained quiet after an initial exchange of pleasantries. Later, when he replayed the scene in his mind, Tom realized he’d ignored his colleague’s silent cry for help.
Tom ran into Ian one last time in early 2013 in the office cafeteria. By then, he looked despondent. Tom tried to buck him up, reminding him that he was earning decent money and urging him not to take his work predicament so seriously. It was just a job, after all. But Ian just stared at his plate, disconsolate.
* * *
—
IAN’S DEMOTION WASN’T the only thing eating away at him. Although he was now a mere in-house consultant, he continued to work closely with the person who had taken his job, Paul Patel. Paul had tremendous respect for Ian as a scientist. When he was in graduate school in England, he had read all about the pioneering work on immunoassays Ian had done in the 1980s at a company called Syva.
After he was promoted, Paul continued to treat Ian as an equal and to consult with him about everything. But they differed in one crucial respect: Paul shied away from conflict and was more willing to compromise with the engineers building the miniLab than Ian was. Ian refused to give an inch and became furious when he felt he was being asked to lower his standards. Paul spent numerous evenings on the phone with him trying to calm him down. During these discussions, Ian told Paul to stand by his convictions and never to lose sight of his concern for the patient.
“Paul, it has to be done right,” Ian would say.
Sunny had put a man named Samartha Anekal, who had a Ph.D. in chemical engineering but no industry experience, in charge of integrating the various parts of the miniLab. Sam was perceived by some of his colleagues as a yes-man who did Sunny’s bidding. Throughout 2012, Ian and Paul had several tense meetings with Sam. Ian stormed out of one of them after Sam informed them that the