During a phone interview Holmes granted him for this second
article, Parloff inquired about an Ebola test Theranos had in the
works. George Shultz had made a passing mention of it at a conference
a few months earlier. Given that an Ebola epidemic had been raging in
West Africa for more than a year, Parloff thought a rapid finger-stick
test to detect the deadly virus could be of great use to public health
authorities and had been interested in writing about it. Holmes said
she expected to obtain emergency-use authorization for the test
shortly and invited him to come see a live demonstration of it at Boies
Schiller’s Manhattan offices.
A few days later, Parloff arrived at the law firm and was greeted by
Dan Edlin, one of Christian Holmes’s Duke fraternity brothers. Edlin
showed him to a conference room where two black Theranos devices
had been set up side by side (they were miniLabs, not Edisons). For
reasons Parloff didn’t understand, Holmes had wanted the demo to
include a potassium test too (no doubt because I had been asking
tough questions about that particular test). So Edlin drew blood from
Parloff’s finger twice. One machine would perform the Ebola test and
the other the potassium test, he explained. Parloff wondered fleetingly
why one of the devices couldn’t simultaneously perform both tests
from a single blood sample but decided not to press the issue.
Parloff and Edlin made small talk while they waited for the test
results. After about twenty-five minutes, the tests still hadn’t been
completed. Edlin said it was because the devices had just been
installed and needed to warm up. The tests’ progress was represented
by the darkening edge of a circle on the devices’ digital screens, like
app downloads on an iPhone. Inside the circle, a percentage number
told the user how much of the test had been completed. Based on how
slowly the edge of one of the circles was filling up, it looked to Parloff
like it might take several more hours. He couldn’t wait around that
long. He told Edlin he needed to head back to work.
After Parloff left, Kyle Logan, the young chemical engineer who had
won an academic award at Stanford named after Channing Robertson,
entered the conference room. He’d flown in with Edlin on the red-eye
from San Francisco that morning and was there to provide technical