can’t convince me that you’re stupid. They can, however, convince me
that you’re wrong and in this case I do believe that you’re wrong.”
—
ERIKA KNEW THAT Tyler had quit and asked herself if she should do the
same. Things in the lab had gotten out of control. In addition to the
four original Edison tests, the assay validation team had cleared a
hepatitis C test on the Edisons for clinical use. Giving patients
inaccurate vitamin D results was one thing, but the stakes got a lot
higher when you were testing for infectious diseases.
A patient order for a hepatitis C test had come in and Erika had
refused to run the sample on the Edisons. When Mark Pandori had
asked her to come talk to him about it, she’d broken down in tears in
his office. Erika and Mark had a good relationship and Erika trusted
him. Ever since he’d arrived a few months earlier, Mark had tried to do
the right thing, including with proficiency testing.
Erika told Mark the reagents for the hepatitis C test were expired,
the Edisons hadn’t been recalibrated in a while, and she simply didn’t
trust the devices. So they had devised a plan to run patient samples on
commercially available hepatitis kits called OraQuick HCV. That had
worked for a while, but then the lab had run out of them. When they’d
tried to place an order for a new batch, Sunny had lost his temper and
threatened to block it.
Then, that very afternoon, at about the same time Tyler had gotten
his mother’s frantic call, Sunny had summoned her to his office. He
had gone through Tyler’s emails and figured out that Erika was the one
who had sent him the proficiency-testing results. Their conversation
had started out cordially enough, but Sunny had berated her when
she’d brought up the quality-control failures in the lab. His parting
words had been, “You need to tell me if you want to work here or not.”
When her shift was over, Erika went to meet up with Tyler. He
suggested she accompany him to his grandfather’s house for dinner. If
George saw that his grandson wasn’t the only employee with
misgivings about the way Theranos operated, he might come around.