before, so he looked into it. He learned that it was an online-only publication based in Italy that charged scientists who wanted to publish in it a five-hundred-dollar fee. He then looked up the paper Holmes had coauthored and was shocked to see that it included data for just one blood test from a grand total of six patients.
In a post on his blog about the New Yorker story, Clapper pointed out the medical journal’s obscurity and the flimsiness of the study and declared himself a skeptic “until I see evidence Theranos can deliver what it says it can deliver in terms of diagnostic accuracy.” Pathology Blawg didn’t exactly have a big readership, but Joe Fuisz came across the post in a Google search and brought it to his father’s attention. Richard Fuisz immediately got in touch with Clapper and told him he was onto something. He put him in contact with Phyllis and Rochelle and urged him to listen to what they had to say. Clapper was intrigued by what the three of them told him, especially by the story of Ian Gibbons’s death. But it all sounded too circumstantial to go beyond what he’d already written. What he needed was some sort of proof, he told Fuisz.
Fuisz was frustrated. What would it take for people to listen to him and finally see through Elizabeth Holmes?
While checking his emails a few days later, Fuisz saw a notification from LinkedIn alerting him that someone new had looked up his profile on the site. The viewer’s name—Alan Beam—didn’t ring a bell but his job title got Fuisz’s attention: laboratory director at Theranos. Fuisz sent Beam a message through the site’s InMail feature asking if they could talk on the phone. He thought the odds of getting a response were very low, but it was worth a try. He was in Malibu taking photos with his old Leica camera the next day when a short reply from Beam appeared in his iPhone in-box. He was willing to talk and he included his cell-phone number. Fuisz drove his black Mercedes E-Class sedan back to Beverly Hills and, when he was just a few blocks from home, dialed the number.
The voice he heard on the other end of the line sounded terrified. “Dr. Fuisz, the reason I’m willing to talk to you is you’re a physician,” Beam said. “You and I took the Hippocratic Oath, which is to first do no harm. Theranos is putting people in harm’s way.” Alan proceeded to tell Fuisz about a litany of problems in the Theranos lab. Fuisz pulled into his driveway and quickly got out of his car. As soon as he was inside his house, he grabbed a notepad he’d brought back from a stay at a hotel in Paris called Le Meurice and started taking notes. Alan was speaking so fast that he was having trouble keeping up with what he was saying. He jotted down:
LIED TO CLIA people & cheated
ROLL OUT DISASTER
Finger stick not accurate—using venipuncture
Transporting Arizona to Palo Alto
Using Siemens equip.
Ethical breaches
False thyroid results
K results all over map
False pregnancy errors
Told Eliz not ready but insisted proceed
Fuisz asked Alan to talk to Joe and to Phyllis. He wanted them to hear it for themselves from the horse’s mouth. Alan agreed to call them and more or less repeated to each of them what he had told Fuisz. But that was all he was willing to do. He wouldn’t talk to anyone else. Boies Schiller lawyers had been hounding him, he said, and he couldn’t afford to be sued like Fuisz had been. Although he sympathized with Alan’s predicament, Fuisz couldn’t just leave it at that. He got back in touch with Clapper and told him about the new connection he had made and what he’d learned. This was the proof he’d been asking for, he told him.
Clapper agreed that this changed everything. The story now had legs. But he decided he couldn’t take it on himself. For one thing, he couldn’t shoulder the legal liability of going up against a $9 billion Silicon Valley company with a litigious track record that was represented by David Boies. For another, he was just an amateur blogger. He didn’t have the journalistic know-how to tackle something like this. Not to mention the fact that he had a full-time medical practice to tend to. This, he thought, was a job for an investigative reporter. In the three years since he’d launched Pathology Blawg, Clapper had