back up the company’s scientific claims was one of them. I’d reported
about health-care issues for the better part of a decade and couldn’t
think of any serious advances in medicine that hadn’t been subject to
peer review. I’d also been struck by a brief description Holmes had
given of the way her secret blood-testing devices worked: “A chemistry
is performed so that a chemical reaction occurs and generates a signal
from the chemical interaction with the sample, which is translated into
a result, which is then reviewed by certified laboratory personnel.”
Those sounded like the words of a high school chemistry student,
not a sophisticated laboratory scientist. The New Yorker writer had
called the description “comically vague.”
When I stopped to think about it, I found it hard to believe that a
college dropout with just two semesters of chemical engineering
courses under her belt had pioneered cutting-edge new science. Sure,
Mark Zuckerberg had learned to code on his father’s computer when
he was ten, but medicine was different: it wasn’t something you could
teach yourself in the basement of your house. You needed years of
formal training and decades of research to add value. There was a
reason many Nobel laureates in medicine were in their sixties when
their achievements were recognized.
Adam said that he’d had a similar reaction to the New Yorker piece
and that a group of people had contacted him after he’d posted a
skeptical item on his blog about it. He was cryptic about their
identities and their connection to Theranos at first, but he said they
had information about the company I’d want to hear. He said he’d
check with them to see if they were willing to talk to me.
In the meantime, I did some preliminary research on Theranos and
came across the Journal’s editorial-page piece from seventeen months
earlier. I hadn’t seen it when it was published. This added an
interesting wrinkle, I thought: my newspaper had played a role in
Holmes’s meteoric rise by being the first mainstream media
organization to publicize her supposed achievements. It made for an
awkward situation, but I wasn’t too worried about it. There was a
firewall between the Journal’s editorial and newsroom staffs. If it
turned out that I found some skeletons in Holmes’s closet, it wouldn’t