the wrong temperatures, it had let reagents expire, and it had failed to
inform patients of flawed test results, among many other lapses.
Heather King tried to prevent us from publishing the report, but it
was too late. We posted it on the Journal’s website and the
accompanying story quoted a laboratory expert who said its findings
suggested the Edisons’ results were no better than guesswork.
The coup de grâce came a few days later when we obtained a new
letter CMS had sent to Theranos. It said the company had failed to
correct forty-three of the forty-five deficiencies the inspectors had
cited it for and threatened to ban Holmes from the blood-testing
business for two years. As with the inspection report, Theranos was
desperately trying to keep the letter from becoming public, but a new
source had contacted me out of the blue and leaked it to me.
When we reported news of the threatened ban, it was no longer
possible for Holmes to downplay the gravity of the situation. She had
to come out and say something, so she gave an interview to Maria
Shriver on NBC’s Today show in which she professed to be
“devastated.” But not enough, it seemed, to apologize to the patients
she had put in harm’s way. Watching her, I got the distinct impression
that her display of contrition was an act. I still didn’t sense any real
remorse or empathy.
After all, Theranos’s employees, its investors, and its retail partner,
Walgreens, had all learned of the inspection’s findings and the
threatened ban by reading the Wall Street Journal. If Holmes was
sincere about making things right, why had she tried so hard to
suppress their disclosure?
—
IN MAY 2016, I returned to the San Francisco Bay Area to try to find out
what had happened to Tyler Shultz. It was almost exactly a year to the
day since we’d met at the beer garden in Mountain View. Erika had
told me Tyler was working on a research project with a
nanotechnology professor at Stanford, so I drove my rental car to Palo
Alto and searched for him in Stanford’s School of Engineering. After