certainly had prostate cancer. But Bradley was skeptical. As he had
done with the other employees, he sent his worried colleague to get
retested at another lab and, lo and behold, that result came back
normal too.
Bradley put together a detailed analysis of the discrepancies. Some
of the differences between the Theranos values and the values from
the other labs were disturbingly large. When the Theranos values did
match those of the other labs, they tended to be for tests performed by
ARUP.
Bradley shared his concerns with Renda and with Brad Wolfsen, the
president of Safeway Health. Her faith already shaken by the delays of
the past two years, Renda encouraged him to talk to Burd about them,
which Bradley did. But Burd politely brushed him off, assuring the ex–
army doctor that the Theranos technology had been vetted and was
sound.
—
THE BLOOD SAMPLES DRAWN from Safeway employees in Pleasanton
were being couriered to a one-story building with a stone façade on
East Meadow Circle in Palo Alto. Theranos had temporarily set up its
fledgling lab there in the spring of 2012 while it moved the rest of its
growing operations from Hillview Avenue to a larger building nearby
formerly occupied by Facebook.
A few months earlier, the lab had obtained a certificate attesting that
it was in compliance with CLIA, the federal law that governed clinical
laboratories, but such certificates weren’t difficult to obtain. Although
the ultimate enforcer of CLIA was the Centers for Medicare and
Medicaid Services, the federal agency delegated most routine lab
inspections to states. In California, they were handled by the state
department of health’s Laboratory Field Services division, which an
audit had shown to be badly underfunded and struggling to fulfill its
oversight responsibilities.
Had Steve Burd been allowed inside the East Meadow Circle lab, a
network of rooms located in the center of the low-slung building, he