Acto precision cutting knives that Justin had fished out of a
wastebasket and claimed as his own.
Aaron mentioned that he was also troubled by the study with cancer
patients in Tennessee. They’d never gotten the microfluidic system
anywhere close to working properly and certainly not well enough to
use on live patients, and yet Elizabeth had pushed ahead with the
study. The shift to the new machine Tony built was an improvement,
but Aaron felt they still didn’t have a good read on its performance.
The engineering and chemistry groups weren’t communicating. Each
was running tests on the parts of the system it was responsible for, but
no one was conducting overall system tests.
Ana listened with rising unease. She’d assumed Theranos had
perfected its blood-testing technology if it was going to be used on
patients. Now Aaron was telling her it was still very much a work in
progress. Ana knew the Tennessee study involved people dying of
cancer. It bothered her to think they might be used as guinea pigs to
test a faulty medical device.
What Ana and Aaron didn’t know and what might have allayed their
concerns somewhat is that the test results Theranos generated from
the cancer patients’ blood would not be used to make any changes to
their treatments. They were to be used only for research purposes, to
help Pfizer assess the effectiveness of Theranos’s technology. But that
was never clear to most Theranos employees because Elizabeth never
explained the terms of the study.
The next morning, Ana reached out to the person who’d introduced
her to Theranos: her former Apple colleague Avie Tevanian. Avie was
on Theranos’s board of directors. He was the one who’d put out feelers
to Ana several months earlier and arranged for her to meet Elizabeth.
Ana met Avie at a Peet’s Coffee in Los Altos and mentioned what she’d
learned from Aaron Moore. She worried that Theranos was crossing an
ethical line with the Tennessee study. Avie listened intently and told
Ana he was beginning to have doubts of his own about the company.