questionable. He also explained the pitfalls of using blood pricked
from a finger. Unlike venous blood drawn from the arm, capillary
blood was polluted by fluids from tissues and cells that interfered with
tests and made measurements less accurate. “I’d be less surprised if
they told us they were time travelers who came back from the twenty-
seventh century than if they told us they cracked that nut,” he said.
Before his change of heart, Alan had mentioned a nurse in Arizona
named Carmen Washington who worked at a clinic owned by
Walgreens and had complained about Theranos’s blood tests. After
trying to track her down for several weeks, I finally got her on the
phone. She told me three of her patients had received questionable
results from the company. One was a sixteen-year-old girl with a sky-
high potassium result that suggested she was at risk of a heart attack.
The result hadn’t made sense given that she was a teenager and in
good health, Carmen said. Two other patients had received results
showing abnormally high levels of thyroid-stimulating hormone, or
TSH. Carmen had called them back in to the clinic and redrawn their
blood. The second time, their results had come back abnormally low.
After that, Carmen had lost faith in Theranos’s finger-stick tests. These
incidents tracked with Alan’s claims. TSH was one of the
immunoassays Theranos performed on the Edison that had failed
proficiency testing.
Carmen Washington’s story was helpful, but I soon had something
better: another Theranos whistleblower. I had dropped Tyler Shultz a
note through LinkedIn’s InMail messaging feature after noticing that
he had viewed my profile on the site. I figured he must have heard
from other former employees that I was poking around. It had been
more than a month since I’d made the overture and I was losing hope
that he would reply when my phone rang.
It was Tyler and he seemed eager to talk. However, he was extremely
worried that Theranos would come after him. He was calling me from
a burner phone that couldn’t be traced back to him. After I agreed to
grant him confidentiality, he told me in broad strokes the story of his
eight months at the company.
Tyler’s motivation for talking to me was twofold. Like Alan, he was