quotes from a senior scientist at Quest who said he didn’t think finger-
stick blood tests could be reliable, and it noted Theranos’s lack of
published, peer-reviewed data. Among the arguments she marshaled
to rebut the latter point, Elizabeth cited a paper she had coauthored in
a medical journal called Hematology Reports. Clapper had never
heard of Hematology Reports before, so he looked into it. He learned
that it was an online-only publication based in Italy that charged
scientists who wanted to publish in it a five-hundred-dollar fee. He
then looked up the paper Holmes had coauthored and was shocked to
see that it included data for just one blood test from a grand total of six
patients.
In a post on his blog about the New Yorker story, Clapper pointed
out the medical journal’s obscurity and the flimsiness of the study and
declared himself a skeptic “until I see evidence Theranos can deliver
what it says it can deliver in terms of diagnostic accuracy.” Pathology
Blawg didn’t exactly have a big readership, but Joe Fuisz came across
the post in a Google search and brought it to his father’s attention.
Richard Fuisz immediately got in touch with Clapper and told him he
was onto something. He put him in contact with Phyllis and Rochelle
and urged him to listen to what they had to say. Clapper was intrigued
by what the three of them told him, especially by the story of Ian
Gibbons’s death. But it all sounded too circumstantial to go beyond
what he’d already written. What he needed was some sort of proof, he
told Fuisz.
Fuisz was frustrated. What would it take for people to listen to him
and finally see through Elizabeth Holmes?
While checking his emails a few days later, Fuisz saw a notification
from LinkedIn alerting him that someone new had looked up his
profile on the site. The viewer’s name—Alan Beam—didn’t ring a bell
but his job title got Fuisz’s attention: laboratory director at Theranos.
Fuisz sent Beam a message through the site’s InMail feature asking if
they could talk on the phone. He thought the odds of getting a
response were very low, but it was worth a try. He was in Malibu
taking photos with his old Leica camera the next day when a short
reply from Beam appeared in his iPhone in-box. He was willing to talk