University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (“Wits” to South
Africans), he’d moved to the United States to take premed classes at
Columbia University in New York City. The choice was guided by his
conservative Jewish parents, who considered only a few professions
acceptable for their son: law, business, and medicine.
Alan had stayed in New York for medical school, enrolling at the
Mount Sinai School of Medicine on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, but
he quickly realized that some aspects of being a doctor didn’t suit his
temperament. Put off by the crazy hours and the sights and smells of
the hospital ward, he gravitated toward the more sedate specialty of
laboratory science, which led to postdoctoral studies in virology and a
residency in clinical pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in
Boston.
In the summer of 2012, Alan was running the lab of a children’s
hospital in Pittsburgh when he noticed a job posting on LinkedIn that
dovetailed perfectly with his budding fascination with Silicon Valley:
laboratory director at a Palo Alto biotech firm. He had just finished
reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. The book, which
he’d found hugely inspiring, had cemented his desire to move out to
the San Francisco Bay Area.
After he applied for the job, Alan was asked to fly out for an
interview scheduled for 6:00 p.m. on a Friday. The timing seemed odd
but he was happy to oblige. He met with Sunny first and then with
Elizabeth. There was something about Sunny that he found vaguely
creepy, but that impression was more than offset by Elizabeth, who
came off as very earnest in her determination to transform health care.
Like most people who met her for the first time, Alan was taken aback
by her deep voice. It was unlike anything he’d heard before.
Although he received a job offer just a few days later, Alan wasn’t
able to start working at Theranos immediately. First, he had to apply
for his California medical license. That took eight months, delaying his
official start until April 2013. By then, it had been almost a year since
his predecessor, Arnold Gelb, had quit. In between, a semiretired lab
director named Spencer Hiraki had come in occasionally to review and
sign off on lab reports. That hadn’t seemed too problematic to Alan