he might be getting through this time, but he wasn’t sure. The old man was hard to read. His years as a senior member of the president’s cabinet, facing down threats like the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, had made him a cipher. He absorbed information but rarely volunteered any. They agreed to meet again for dinner that evening at his grandfather’s house. As they parted, George told Tyler, “They’re trying to convince me that you’re stupid. They can’t convince me that you’re stupid. They can, however, convince me that you’re wrong and in this case I do believe that you’re wrong.”
* * *
—
ERIKA KNEW THAT Tyler had quit and asked herself if she should do the same. Things in the lab had gotten out of control. In addition to the four original Edison tests, the assay validation team had cleared a hepatitis C test on the Edisons for clinical use. Giving patients inaccurate vitamin D results was one thing, but the stakes got a lot higher when you were testing for infectious diseases.
A patient order for a hepatitis C test had come in and Erika had refused to run the sample on the Edisons. When Mark Pandori had asked her to come talk to him about it, she’d broken down in tears in his office. Erika and Mark had a good relationship and Erika trusted him. Ever since he’d arrived a few months earlier, Mark had tried to do the right thing, including with proficiency testing.
Erika told Mark the reagents for the hepatitis C test were expired, the Edisons hadn’t been recalibrated in a while, and she simply didn’t trust the devices. So they had devised a plan to run patient samples on commercially available hepatitis kits called OraQuick HCV. That had worked for a while, but then the lab had run out of them. When they’d tried to place an order for a new batch, Sunny had lost his temper and threatened to block it.
Then, that very afternoon, at about the same time Tyler had gotten his mother’s frantic call, Sunny had summoned her to his office. He had gone through Tyler’s emails and figured out that Erika was the one who had sent him the proficiency-testing results. Their conversation had started out cordially enough, but Sunny had berated her when she’d brought up the quality-control failures in the lab. His parting words had been, “You need to tell me if you want to work here or not.”
When her shift was over, Erika went to meet up with Tyler. He suggested she accompany him to his grandfather’s house for dinner. If George saw that his grandson wasn’t the only employee with misgivings about the way Theranos operated, he might come around. Erika agreed that it was worth a try.
When they got there, however, it quickly became apparent to Tyler that his grandfather’s allegiance to Theranos had strengthened in the intervening hours. As the Shultzes’ household staff waited on them, Tyler and Erika ran through the list of their concerns, but only George’s wife, Charlotte, seemed receptive to what they were saying. She kept asking them in a shocked tone of voice to repeat various parts of their story.
George, on the other hand, was unmoved. Tyler had noticed how much he doted on Elizabeth. His relationship with her seemed closer than their own. Tyler also knew that his grandfather was passionate about science. Scientific progress would make the world a better place and save it from such perils as pandemics and climate change, he often told his grandson. This passion seemed to make him unable to let go of the promise of Theranos.
George said a top surgeon in New York had told him the company was going to revolutionize the field of surgery and this was someone his good friend Henry Kissinger considered to be the smartest man alive. And according to Elizabeth, Theranos’s devices were already being used in medevac helicopters and hospital operating rooms, so they must be working.
Tyler and Erika tried to tell him that couldn’t possibly be true given that the devices were barely working within the walls of Theranos. But it was clear they weren’t making any headway. George urged them to put the company behind them and to move on with their lives. They both had bright futures ahead, he told them. They left the dinner frustrated, with little choice but to follow his advice.
The next morning, Erika quit too. She wrote up a short resignation letter