1974 and climbed the corporate ranks to become one of Burd’s top
deputies, and other executives involved in the project were surprised
by how much latitude he gave the young woman. He usually held his
deputies and the company’s business partners to firm deadlines, but
he allowed Elizabeth to miss one after the other. Some of Burd’s
colleagues knew he had two sons. They began to wonder if he saw in
Elizabeth the daughter he’d never had. Whatever it was, he was in her
thrall.
—
AFTER ALL THE DELAYS, the partnership seemed to finally be getting off
the ground in the early months of 2012: as a beta run before a full
launch, the companies had agreed that Theranos would take over the
blood testing at an employee health clinic Safeway had opened on its
corporate campus in Pleasanton. The clinic was part of Burd’s strategy
to curb the supermarket operator’s health-care costs by encouraging
its workers to take better care of themselves. It offered free checkups.
Employees who scored well on them were entitled to discounts on
their health plan premiums. Conveniently located next to the gym on
the Safeway campus, it was staffed with a doctor and three nurse
practitioners and featured five exam rooms. It also had a little lab. A
new sign in the reception area read, “Testing done by Theranos.”
The employee clinic was part of Renda’s portfolio. Among other
responsibilities, she oversaw Safeway Health, the subsidiary Burd had
created to sell the retailer’s health benefits expertise to other
companies. Renda’s husband had lost his battle with lung cancer since
Elizabeth had first showed up in Pleasanton two years before, but she
hoped Theranos’s painless finger-stick tests would spare others the
torment he’d endured getting repeatedly stuck with needles in the last
months of his life.
Renda had just hired Safeway’s first chief medical officer. His name
was Kent Bradley and he came from the U.S. Army, where he had
served for more than seventeen years after attending West Point and
the armed forces’ medical school in Bethesda, Maryland. Bradley’s last