that way. These three hundred tests represented 99 to 99.9 percent of
all laboratory requests, and Theranos had submitted every single one
of them to the FDA for approval, he said.
Sunny and Elizabeth’s boldest claim was that the Theranos system
was capable of running seventy different blood tests simultaneously on
a single finger-stick sample and that it would soon be able to run even
more. The ability to perform so many tests on just a drop or two of
blood was something of a Holy Grail in the field of microfluidics.
Thousands of researchers around the world in universities and
industry had been pursuing this goal for more than two decades, ever
since the Swiss scientist Andreas Manz had shown that the
microfabrication techniques developed by the computer chip industry
could be repurposed to make small channels that moved tiny volumes
of fluids.
But it had remained beyond reach for a few basic reasons. The main
one was that different classes of blood tests required vastly different
methods. Once you’d used your micro blood sample to perform an
immunoassay, there usually wasn’t enough blood left for the
completely different set of lab techniques a general chemistry or
hematology assay required. Another was that, while microfluidic chips
could handle very small volumes, no one had yet figured out how to
avoid losing some of the sample during its transfer to the chip. Losing
a little bit of the blood sample didn’t matter much when it was large,
but it became a big problem when it was tiny. To hear Elizabeth and
Sunny tell it, Theranos had solved these and other difficulties—
challenges that had bedeviled an entire branch of bioengineering
research.
Besides Theranos’s supposed scientific accomplishments, what
helped win James and Grossman over was its board of directors. In
addition to Shultz and Mattis, it now included former secretary of state
Henry Kissinger, former secretary of defense William Perry, former
Senate Arms Services Committee chairman Sam Nunn, and former
navy admiral Gary Roughead. These were men with sterling, larger-
than-life reputations who gave Theranos a stamp of legitimacy. The
common denominator between all of them was that, like Shultz, they