degrees had done the work she’d patented.
As the two sides prepared for trial, Fuisz noticed one name that
appeared as a co-inventor on many of Elizabeth’s patents: Ian
Gibbons. With a little research, he learned a few basic facts about the
man. Gibbons was a Brit who had a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the
University of Cambridge, and he was credited as an inventor on some
fifty U.S. patents, including nineteen stemming from his work at a
company called Biotrack Laboratories in the 1980s and 1990s.
Fuisz presumed that Gibbons was a legitimate scientist and that,
like most scientists, he was an honest person. If he could get him to
admit under oath that there was nothing in his patent that borrowed
from, or was similar to, Elizabeth’s early patent applications, it would
deal a big blow to Theranos’s case. He and Joe had also noticed that
some of Gibbons’s Biotrack patents were similar to the Theranos ones,
opening the company up to charges that it had improperly recycled
some of his past work. They added Gibbons’s name to the list of
witnesses they wanted to depose. But then something strange
happened: over the next five weeks, the Boies Schiller attorneys kept
ignoring their request to schedule Gibbons’s deposition. Suspicious,
the Fuiszes asked their lawyers to press the matter.