Bad Blood

(Axel Boer) #1

who learn English as a second language of always speaking in the
present tense.


A member of Theranos’s board had recently approached him about
taking over engineering at the startup. If he accepted the job, his task
would be to turn the Theranos 1.0 prototype into a viable product the
company could commercialize. After hearing Elizabeth’s inspiring
pitch, he decided to sign on.


It didn’t take Ed long to realize that Theranos was the toughest
engineering challenge he’d ever tackled. His experience was in
electronics, not medical devices. And the prototype he’d inherited
didn’t really work. It was more like a mock-up of what Elizabeth had in
mind. He had to turn the mock-up into a functioning device.


The main difficulty stemmed from Elizabeth’s insistence that they
use very little blood. She’d inherited from her mother a phobia of
needles; Noel Holmes fainted at the mere sight of a syringe. Elizabeth
wanted the Theranos technology to work with just a drop of blood
pricked from the tip of a finger. She was so fixated on the idea that she
got upset when an employee bought red Hershey’s Kisses and put the
Theranos logo on them for a company display at a job fair. The
Hershey’s Kisses were meant to represent drops of blood, but
Elizabeth felt they were much too big to convey the tiny volumes she
had in mind.


Her obsession with miniaturization extended to the cartridge. She
wanted it to fit in the palm of a hand, further complicating Ed’s task.
He and his team spent months reengineering it, but they never
reached a point where they could reliably reproduce the same test
results from the same blood samples.


The quantity of blood they were allowed to work with was so small
that it had to be diluted with a saline solution to create more volume.
That made what would otherwise have been relatively routine
chemistry work a lot more challenging.


Adding another level of complexity, blood and saline weren’t the
only fluids that had to flow through the cartridge. The reactions that
occurred when the blood reached the little wells required chemicals
known as reagents. Those were stored in separate chambers.

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