Theranos diluted finger-stick samples before running them on
commercial machines. “What the Journal described—that we take a
sample, dilute it, and put it on a commercial analyzer—is inaccurate,
and that’s not what we do,” she told Krim. “In fact, I bet you if you
tried that, it wouldn’t work because it’s just not possible to dilute a
sample and put it onto a commercial analyzer. I mean, there are so
many things that are wrong with that.” As I shook my head in disgust,
a text flashed on my phone screen. It was from Alan Beam: “I can’t
believe what she just said!” he wrote.
From there, Holmes turned her sights on the former employees who
had spoken to me, calling them “confused” and seizing on their
anonymity to discredit them. She claimed that one of them had
worked at Theranos for only two months back in 2005, which was a
complete fabrication. All our confidential sources had worked at the
company in recent times. In response to a question about Rochelle
Gibbons, she reprised the line she’d used with her employees five days
earlier, likening the Journal to “a tabloid magazine.” And she referred
to me as “some guy” who had reported “false stuff about us.”
One problem she faced was that we were no longer the only ones
raising questions about Theranos. Several prominent Silicon Valley
figures had begun criticizing the company publicly. One of them was a
well-known former Apple executive named Jean-Louis Gassée. A few
days earlier, Gassée had published an item on his blog describing
sharply discordant blood-test results he had received from Theranos
and Stanford Hospital over the summer. Gassée had written Holmes
to inquire about the discrepancies but had never received a response.
When Krim raised Gassée’s case, Holmes claimed to have never
received his email. Now that it knew about his complaint, Theranos
would reach out to him to try to understand what had happened, she
said.
As for the other instances of inaccurate test results described in our
first story, she dismissed them as a few isolated cases from which
general conclusions could not and should not be drawn.
Soon after the interview ended, Theranos posted a long document
on its website that purported to rebut my reporting point by point.