would have noticed that it didn’t contain a single Theranos proprietary
device. That’s because the miniLab was still under development and
nowhere near ready for patient testing. What the lab did contain was
more than a dozen commercial blood and body-fluid analyzers made
by companies such as Chicago-based Abbott Laboratories, Germany’s
Siemens, and Italy’s DiaSorin. The lab was run by an awkward
pathologist named Arnold Gelb, who went by Arne (pronounced
“Arnie”), and staffed with a handful of clinical laboratory scientists, or
CLSs—lab technicians who are certified by the state to handle human
samples. Although it made use of only commercial instruments at this
juncture, there were still plenty of things that could and did go wrong.
The main problem was the lab’s dearth of experienced personnel.
One of the CLSs, a fellow by the name of Kosal Lim, was so sloppy and
poorly trained that one of his counterparts, Diana Dupuy, was
convinced he was jeopardizing the accuracy of test results. Dupuy was
from Houston and had trained at MD Anderson, the city’s world-
renowned cancer center. She’d spent most of her seven years since
becoming a CLS as a blood-transfusion specialist, which had given her
extensive exposure to CLIA regulations. She operated strictly by the
book and didn’t hesitate to report violations when she saw them.
To Dupuy, Lim’s blunders were inexcusable. They included ignoring
manufacturers’ instructions for how to handle reagents; putting
expired reagents in the same refrigerator as current ones; running
patient tests on lab equipment that hadn’t been calibrated; improperly
performing quality-control runs on an analyzer; doing tasks he hadn’t
been trained to do; and contaminating a bottle of Wright’s stain, a
mixture of dyes used to differentiate blood cell types. Dupuy, who had
a fiery streak, confronted Lim on several occasions, telling him at one
point that she was going to become a laboratory inspector to root out
bad lab technicians like him. When he proved unable to meet her
standards, she began documenting his poor practices in regular emails
she sent to Gelb and to Sunny, often attaching photos to prove her
point.
Dupuy also had concerns about the competence of the two
phlebotomists Theranos had stationed in Pleasanton. Blood is