whatever equipment and supplies they wanted.
Elizabeth christened the machine she assigned them to build the
“miniLab.” As its name suggested, her overarching concern was its
size: she still nurtured the vision of someday putting it in people’s
homes and wanted something that could fit on a desk or a shelf. This
posed engineering challenges because, in order to run all the tests she
wanted, the miniLab would need to have many more components than
the Edison. In addition to the Edison’s photomultiplier tube, the new
device would need to cram three other laboratory instruments in one
small space: a spectrophotometer, a cytometer, and an isothermal
amplifier.
None of these were new inventions. The first commercial
spectrophotometer was developed in 1941 by the American chemist
Arnold Beckman, founder of the lab equipment maker Beckman
Coulter. It works by beaming rays of colored light through a blood
sample and measuring how much of the light the sample absorbs. The
concentration of a molecule in the blood is then inferred from the level
of light absorption. Spectrophotometers are used to measure
substances like cholesterol, glucose, and hemoglobin. Cytometry, a
way of counting blood cells, was invented in the nineteenth century.
It’s used to diagnose anemia and blood cancers, among other
disorders.
Laboratories all over the world had been using these instruments for
decades. In other words, Theranos wasn’t pioneering any new ways to
test blood. Rather, the miniLab’s value would lie in the miniaturization
of existing lab technology. While that might not amount to
groundbreaking science, it made sense in the context of Elizabeth’s
vision of taking blood testing out of central laboratories and bringing it
to drugstores, supermarkets, and, eventually, people’s homes.
To be sure, there were already portable blood analyzers on the
market. One of them, a device that looked like a small ATM called the
Piccolo Xpress, could perform thirty-one different blood tests and
produce results in as little as twelve minutes. It required only three or
four drops of blood for a panel of a half dozen commonly ordered
tests. However, neither the Piccolo nor other existing portable