I

| NINETEEN |

The Tip

t was the second Monday in February and I was sitting at my
messy desk in the Wall Street Journal’s Midtown Manhattan
newsroom casting about for a new story to sink my teeth into. I’d
recently finished work on a year-long investigation of Medicare fraud
and had no idea what to do next. After sixteen years at the Journal,
this was something I still hadn’t mastered: the art of swiftly and
efficiently transitioning from one investigative project to the next.

My phone rang. It was Adam from Pathology Blawg. I’d sought his
help eight months earlier when I was trying to understand the
complexities of laboratory billing for one of my stories in the Medicare
series. He’d patiently explained to me what lab procedures certain
billing codes corresponded to—knowledge I’d later used to expose a
scam at a big operator of cancer treatment centers.

Adam told me he’d stumbled across what he thought could be a big
story. People often come to journalists with tips. Nine times out of ten,
they don’t pan out, but I always took the time to listen. You never
knew. Besides, at this particular moment, I was like a dog without a
bone. I needed a new bone to chew on.

Adam asked if I’d read a recent feature in The New Yorker about a
Silicon Valley prodigy named Elizabeth Holmes and her company,
Theranos. As it turned out, I had. I subscribed to the magazine and
often read it on the subway to and from work.

Now that he mentioned it, there were some things I’d read in that
article that I’d found suspect. The lack of any peer-reviewed data to