doing her graduate research. They’d never had children, but Ian doted
on their dogs Chloe and Lucy and on Livia, a cat he’d named after the
wife of the Roman emperor Augustus.
Besides reading, Ian’s other two hobbies were going to the opera—
he and Rochelle regularly went to San Francisco’s War Memorial
Opera House and in the summer flew to New Mexico to attend open-
air performances of the Santa Fe Opera at dusk—and photography.
For laughs, he liked altering photos. One of the many he doctored
showed him as a gloved and bow-tied mad scientist mixing blue and
purple potions. In another, he inserted himself into the foreground of
a portrait of the British royal family.
As a biochemist, Ian’s specialty was immunoassays, which was the
main reason Theranos had focused its early efforts on that class of test.
He was passionate about the science of blood testing and loved to
teach it. In the company’s early years, he would sometimes hold little
lectures to educate the rest of the staff about the fundamentals of
biochemistry. He also did presentations about how to create various
blood tests that were recorded and stored on the company’s servers.
One source of recurring tension between Ian and the Theranos
engineers was his insistence that the blood tests that he and the other
chemists designed perform as accurately inside the Theranos devices
as they did on the lab bench. The data he collected suggested that was
rarely the case, which caused him considerable frustration. He and
Tony Nugent butted heads over this issue during the development of
the Edison. As admirable as Ian’s exacting standards were, Tony felt
that all he did was complain and that he never offered any solutions.
Ian also had issues with Elizabeth’s management, especially the way
she siloed the groups off from one another and discouraged them from
communicating. The reason she and Sunny invoked for this way of
operating was that Theranos was “in stealth mode,” but it made no
sense to Ian. At the other diagnostics companies where he had worked,
there had always been cross-functional teams with representatives
from the chemistry, engineering, manufacturing, quality control, and
regulatory departments working toward a common objective. That was
how you got everyone on the same page, solved problems, and met