but reasonable and a workable compromise had been reached.
The limited experiment agreed upon fell short of the more
ambitious live field trial Mattis had had in mind. Theranos’s blood
tests would not be used to inform the treatment of wounded soldiers.
They would only be performed on leftover samples after the fact to see
if their results matched the army’s regular testing methods. But it was
something. Earlier in his career, Shoemaker had spent five years
overseeing the development of diagnostic tests for biological threat
agents and he would have given his left arm to get access to
anonymized samples from service members in theater. The data
generated from such testing could be very useful in supporting
applications to the FDA.
Yet, over the ensuing months, Theranos inexplicably failed to take
advantage of the opportunity it was given. When General Mattis
retired from the military in March 2013, the study using leftover de-
identified samples hadn’t begun. When Colonel Edgar took on a new
assignment as commander of the Army Medical Research Institute of
Infectious Diseases a few months later, it still hadn’t started. Theranos
just couldn’t seem to get its act together.
In July 2013, Lieutenant Colonel Shoemaker retired from the army.
At his farewell ceremony, his Fort Detrick colleagues presented him
with a “certificate of survival” for having the courage to stand up to
Mattis in person and emerging from the encounter alive. They also
gave him a T-shirt with the question, “What do you do after surviving a
briefing with a 4 star?” written on the front. The answer could be
found on the back: “Retire and sail off into the sunset.”