spoken to several about lab-industry abuses. There was one in particular who came to mind. He worked for the Wall Street Journal.
| NINETEEN |
The Tip
It was the second Monday in February and I was sitting at my messy desk in the Wall Street Journal’s Midtown Manhattan newsroom casting about for a new story to sink my teeth into. I’d recently finished work on a year-long investigation of Medicare fraud and had no idea what to do next. After sixteen years at the Journal, this was something I still hadn’t mastered: the art of swiftly and efficiently transitioning from one investigative project to the next.
My phone rang. It was Adam from Pathology Blawg. I’d sought his help eight months earlier when I was trying to understand the complexities of laboratory billing for one of my stories in the Medicare series. He’d patiently explained to me what lab procedures certain billing codes corresponded to—knowledge I’d later used to expose a scam at a big operator of cancer treatment centers.
Adam told me he’d stumbled across what he thought could be a big story. People often come to journalists with tips. Nine times out of ten, they don’t pan out, but I always took the time to listen. You never knew. Besides, at this particular moment, I was like a dog without a bone. I needed a new bone to chew on.
Adam asked if I’d read a recent feature in The New Yorker about a Silicon Valley prodigy named Elizabeth Holmes and her company, Theranos. As it turned out, I had. I subscribed to the magazine and often read it on the subway to and from work.
Now that he mentioned it, there were some things I’d read in that article that I’d found suspect. The lack of any peer-reviewed data to back up the company’s scientific claims was one of them. I’d reported about health-care issues for the better part of a decade and couldn’t think of any serious advances in medicine that hadn’t been subject to peer review. I’d also been struck by a brief description Holmes had given of the way her secret blood-testing devices worked: “A chemistry is performed so that a chemical reaction occurs and generates a signal from the chemical interaction with the sample, which is translated into a result, which is then reviewed by certified laboratory personnel.”
Those sounded like the words of a high school chemistry student, not a sophisticated laboratory scientist. The New Yorker writer had called the description “comically vague.”
When I stopped to think about it, I found it hard to believe that a college dropout with just two semesters of chemical engineering courses under her belt had pioneered cutting-edge new science. Sure, Mark Zuckerberg had learned to code on his father’s computer when he was ten, but medicine was different: it wasn’t something you could teach yourself in the basement of your house. You needed years of formal training and decades of research to add value. There was a reason many Nobel laureates in medicine were in their sixties when their achievements were recognized.
Adam said that he’d had a similar reaction to the New Yorker piece and that a group of people had contacted him after he’d posted a skeptical item on his blog about it. He was cryptic about their identities and their connection to Theranos at first, but he said they had information about the company I’d want to hear. He said he’d check with them to see if they were willing to talk to me.
In the meantime, I did some preliminary research on Theranos and came across the Journal’s editorial-page piece from seventeen months earlier. I hadn’t seen it when it was published. This added an interesting wrinkle, I thought: my newspaper had played a role in Holmes’s meteoric rise by being the first mainstream media organization to publicize her supposed achievements. It made for an awkward situation, but I wasn’t too worried about it. There was a firewall between the Journal’s editorial and newsroom staffs. If it turned out that I found some skeletons in Holmes’s closet, it wouldn’t be the first time the two sides of the paper had contradicted each other.
Two weeks after our initial conversation, Adam put me in touch with Richard and Joe Fuisz, Phyllis Gardner, and Rochelle Gibbons. It was disappointing at first to hear that the Fuiszes had been involved in litigation with Theranos. Even if they insisted they’d been wrongly accused, the lawsuit gave them a big ax to grind and made