could perform as many as seventy different blood tests from one tiny
finger-stick draw and she led him to believe that the more than two
hundred tests on its menu were all finger-stick tests done with
proprietary technology. Since he didn’t have the expertise to vet her
scientific claims, Parloff interviewed the prominent members of her
board of directors and effectively relied on them as character
witnesses. He talked to Shultz, Perry, Kissinger, Nunn, Mattis, and to
two new directors: Richard Kovacevich, the former CEO of the giant
bank Wells Fargo, and former Senate majority leader Bill Frist. Before
going into politics, Frist had been a heart and lung transplant surgeon.
All of them vouched for Elizabeth emphatically. Shultz and Mattis
were particularly effusive.
“Everywhere you look with this young lady, there’s a purity of
motivation,” Shultz told him. “I mean she really is trying to make the
world better, and this is her way of doing it.”
Mattis went out of his way to praise her integrity. “She has probably
one of the most mature and well-honed sense of ethics—personal
ethics, managerial ethics, business ethics, medical ethics that I’ve ever
heard articulated,” the retired general gushed.
Parloff didn’t end up using those quotes in his article, but the
ringing endorsements he heard in interview after interview from the
luminaries on Theranos’s board gave him confidence that Elizabeth
was the real deal. He also liked to think of himself as a pretty good
judge of character. After all, he’d dealt with his share of dishonest
people over the years, having worked in a prison during law school and
later writing at length about such fraudsters as the carpet-cleaning
entrepreneur Barry Minkow and the lawyer Marc Dreier, both of
whom went to prison for masterminding Ponzi schemes. Sure,
Elizabeth had a secretive streak when it came to discussing certain
specifics about her company, but he found her for the most part to be
genuine and sincere. Since his angle was no longer the patent case, he
didn’t bother to reach out to the Fuiszes.