TBWA\Health. He wondered why it wasn’t handling this assignment
or at least being consulted.
Elizabeth had mentioned a report several hundred pages long
supporting Theranos’s scientific claims. Kate and Mike repeatedly
asked to see it, but Theranos wouldn’t produce it. Instead, the
company sent them a password-protected file containing what it said
were excerpts from the report. It stated that the Johns Hopkins
University School of Medicine had conducted due diligence on the
Theranos technology and found it “novel and sound” and capable of
“accurately” running “a wide range of routine and special assays.”
Those quotes weren’t from any lengthy report, however. They were
from the two-page summary of Elizabeth and Sunny’s meeting with
five Hopkins officials in April 2010. As it had done with Walgreens,
Theranos was again using that meeting to claim that its system had
been independently evaluated. But that simply wasn’t true. Bill Clarke,
the director of clinical toxicology at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and
one of three university scientists who attended the 2010 meeting, had
asked Elizabeth to ship one of her devices to his lab so he could put it
through its paces and compare its performance to the equipment he
normally used. She had indicated she would but had never followed
through. Kate and Mike didn’t know any of this, but the fact that
Theranos refused to show them the full report made them suspicious.
—
TO GAIN some insights into how to market to doctors, Chiat\Day
proposed conducting focus group interviews with a few physicians.
Theranos signed off on the idea but wanted to keep things hush-hush,
so Kate enlisted her wife and her father to participate in them.
Kate’s wife, Tracy, was chief resident at Los Angeles County General,
where she was completing a residency in internal medicine and
pediatrics. During her interview, which was conducted by phone,
Tracy asked some questions that no one on the Theranos end of the
line seemed able to answer. That evening, she told Kate she was
dubious that the company had any truly novel technology. She