military assignment had been to run the European wing of Tricare, the
health insurance program for active and retired servicemen. Among
other responsibilities, Renda gave the soft-spoken former army doctor
oversight of the campus clinic.
Bradley had worked with a lot of sophisticated medical technologies
in the army, so he was curious to see the Theranos system in action.
However, he was surprised to learn that Theranos wasn’t planning on
putting any of its devices in the Pleasanton clinic. Instead, it had
stationed two phlebotomists there to draw blood, and the samples they
collected were couriered across San Francisco Bay to Palo Alto for
testing. He also noticed that the phlebotomists were drawing blood
from every employee twice, once with a lancet applied to the index
finger and a second time the old-fashioned way with a hypodermic
needle inserted in the arm. Why the need for venipunctures—the
medical term for needle draws—if the Theranos finger-stick
technology was fully developed and ready to be rolled out to
consumers, he wondered.
Bradley’s suspicions were further aroused by the amount of time it
took to get results back. His understanding had been that the tests
were supposed to be quasi-instantaneous, but some Safeway
employees were having to wait as long as two weeks to receive their
results. And not every test was performed by Theranos itself. Even
though the startup had never said anything about outsourcing some of
the testing, Bradley discovered that it was farming out some tests to a
big reference laboratory in Salt Lake City called ARUP.
What really set off Bradley’s alarm bells, though, was when some
otherwise healthy employees started coming to him with concerns
about abnormal test results. As a precaution, he sent them to get
retested at a Quest or LabCorp location. Each time, the new set of tests
came back normal, suggesting the Theranos results were off. Then one
day, a senior Safeway executive got his PSA result back. The acronym
stands for “prostate-specific antigen,” which is a protein produced by
cells in the prostate gland. The higher the protein’s concentration in a
man’s blood, the likelier he is to have prostate cancer. The senior
Safeway executive’s result was very elevated, indicating he almost