One former high-ranking lab employee did agree to talk to me but
only off the record. This was an important journalistic distinction:
Alan and the other two former employees had agreed to speak to me
on deep background, which meant I could use what they told me while
keeping their identities confidential. Off the record meant I couldn’t
make any use of the information. The conversation was nonetheless
helpful because this source confirmed a lot of what Alan had told me,
giving me the confidence to forge on. He summed up what was going
on at the company with an analogy: “The way Theranos is operating is
like trying to build a bus while you’re driving the bus. Someone is
going to get killed.”
A few days later, Alan got back in touch with some good news. I had
asked him to call the Washington, D.C., whistleblower law firm he’d
reached out to in the fall to see if he could retrieve the email exchange
with Balwani he had sent to it. The firm had just complied with his
request. Alan forwarded the exchange to me. It was a chain of eighteen
emails about proficiency testing between Sunny Balwani, Daniel
Young, Mark Pandori, and Alan. It showed Balwani angrily
admonishing Alan and Mark Pandori for running the proficiency-
testing samples on the Edison and reluctantly acknowledging that the
device had “failed” the test. Moreover, it left no doubt that Holmes
knew about the incident: she was copied on most of the emails.
This was another step forward, but it was soon followed by a step
backward. In late March, Alan got cold feet. He stood by everything
he’d told me, but he no longer wanted to be involved with the story
going forward. He couldn’t stomach the risks anymore. Talking to me
gave him palpitations and distracted him from his new job, he said. I
tried to get him to change his mind but he was resolute, so I decided to
give him some space and hoped he would eventually come around.
Although it was a big setback, I was slowly making headway on
other fronts. Wanting a neutral opinion from a lab expert about
Theranos’s dilution of blood samples and the way it conducted
proficiency testing, I called Timothy Hamill, vice chairman of the
University of California, San Francisco’s Department of Laboratory
Medicine. Tim confirmed to me that both practices were highly