need for such contortions.
The conversation shifted to the syphilis test and what Tyler felt was
its overstated sensitivity. Again, Daniel had a ready explanation: some
of the Edisons’ syphilis results had fallen into an equivocal zone.
Results in that zone hadn’t been included in the sensitivity calculation.
Tyler remained dubious. There didn’t seem to be any predefined
criteria for this so-called equivocal zone. It could be widened at will
until the sensitivity reached whatever number the company wanted. In
the case of the syphilis test, it was so wide that more samples had been
deemed equivocal than the Edisons had correctly identified as
positive. Tyler asked Daniel if he thought Theranos’s syphilis test was
truly the most accurate syphilis test on the market, as the company
claimed. Daniel replied that Theranos had never claimed to have the
most accurate tests.
After Tyler got back to his desk, he googled the two recent articles
that had been published in the press about Theranos and emailed
them to Daniel. One of them was Elizabeth’s Wall Street Journal
interview, which stated that Theranos’s tests were “more accurate than
the conventional methods” and called that improved accuracy a
scientific advance. When they met again a few days later, Daniel
allowed that the statements in the Journal piece were too sweeping
but argued that they had been made by the writer, not by Elizabeth
herself. Tyler found this argument a little too convenient. Surely the
writer hadn’t made up these claims on his own; he must have heard
them from Elizabeth. A faint smile briefly crossed Daniel’s lips.
“Well, sometimes Elizabeth exaggerates in an interview setting,” he
said.
There was something else that was bothering Tyler—something he’d
just gotten wind of from Erika—and he decided to bring that up too.
All clinical laboratories must submit three times a year to something
called “proficiency testing,” an exercise designed to ferret out labs
whose testing isn’t accurate. Accredited bodies like the College of
American Pathologists send laboratories samples of preserved blood
plasma and ask them to test them for various analytes.
During its first two years of operation, the Theranos lab had always