and scheduled an appointment with his general practitioner for the next morning.
* * *
—
WHEN ROCHELLE GOT UP around seven thirty a.m. on May 16, she saw that the bathroom light was on and the door closed. She assumed Ian was getting ready to go to the doctor’s. But when he failed to come out after a while and didn’t answer her calls, she pushed the bathroom door open. She found her husband hunched over in a chair unconscious and barely breathing. Panicked, she called 911.
Ian spent the next eight days hooked up to a ventilator at Stanford Hospital. He had taken enough acetaminophen, the active ingredient in painkillers like Tylenol, to kill a horse. Combined with the wine he’d consumed, the drug had destroyed his liver. He was pronounced dead on May 23. As an expert chemist, Ian knew exactly what he was doing. Rochelle later found a signed will that he’d had witnessed by Paul Patel and another colleague a few weeks before.
Rochelle was overwhelmed with grief but she found the strength to call Elizabeth’s office and left a message with her assistant informing her about Ian’s passing. Elizabeth didn’t call back. Instead, later that day, Rochelle received an email from a Theranos lawyer requesting that she immediately return Ian’s company laptop and cell phone and any other confidential information he might have retained.
Inside Theranos, Ian’s death was handled with the same cold, businesslike approach. Most employees weren’t even informed of it. Elizabeth notified only a small group of company veterans in a brief email that made a vague mention of holding a memorial service for him. She never followed up and no service was held. Longtime colleagues of Ian’s like Anjali Laghari, a chemist who had worked closely with him for eight years at Theranos and for two years before that at another biotech company, were left guessing about what had happened. Most thought he had died of cancer.
Tony Nugent became upset that nothing was done to honor his late colleague’s memory. He and Ian hadn’t been close. In fact, they had fought like cats and dogs at times during the Edison’s development. But he was bothered by the lack of empathy being shown toward someone who had contributed nearly a decade of his life to the company. It was as if working at Theranos was gradually stripping them all of their humanity. Determined to show he was still a human being with compassion for his fellow man, Tony downloaded a list of Ian’s patents from the patent office’s online database and cut and pasted them into an email. He embedded a photo of Ian above the list and sent the email around to the two dozen colleagues he could think of who had worked with him, making a point to copy Elizabeth. It wasn’t much, but it would at least give people something to remember him by, Tony thought.
| THIRTEEN |
Chiat\Day
“You’re the leader.” Click. Click. Click. “Strong, powerful.” Click. Click. “Think of your mission.” Click. Click. Click. Click.
The famous portrait photographer Martin Schoeller was softly whispering directions to Elizabeth in his thick German accent to elicit a range of emotions from her as he snapped her picture. She was wearing a thin black turtleneck and red lipstick, her hair brushed back in a loose bun that covered her ears. Two vertical lamps were set on either side of the chair she was sitting in to flatly illuminate her narrow face and create the white lights in her pupils that were a trademark of Schoeller’s photographs.
Hiring Schoeller had been the idea of Patrick O’Neill, the creative director of advertising agency TBWA\Chiat\Day’s Los Angeles office. Chiat\Day was working on a secret marketing campaign for Theranos. The assignment ranged from creating a brand identity to building a new website and a smartphone app for the company ahead of the commercial launch of its blood-testing services in Walgreens and Safeway stores.
Elizabeth had chosen Chiat\Day because it was the agency that represented Apple for many years, creating its iconic 1984 Macintosh ad and later its “Think Different” campaign in the late 1990s. She’d even tried to convince Lee Clow, the creative genius behind those ads, to come out of retirement to work for her. Clow had politely referred her back to the agency, where she had immediately connected with Patrick.
A strikingly handsome man with blond hair, blue eyes, and the sculpted physique of someone who worked out religiously, Patrick was taken with Elizabeth from the moment he met her. His