bouncy house like an excited child. This year, the bouncy house was
replaced by an inflatable boxing ring. While employees wearing sumo
suits and oversized boxing gloves wobbled around in it, Elizabeth was
delighting in the costume of an engineer disguised as a giant
neutrophil.
Alan was supposed to be a zombie and he felt like one. In retrospect,
leaving his tranquil post in Pittsburgh to come work at Theranos had
been like crossing into his own strange version of the Twilight Zone.
For his first few months as laboratory director, he’d clung to the belief
that the company was going to transform lab testing with its
technology. But the past year’s events had shattered any illusion of
that. He now felt like a pawn in a dangerous game being played with
patients, investors, and regulators. At one point, he’d had to talk
Sunny and Elizabeth out of running HIV tests on diluted finger-stick
samples. Unreliable potassium and cholesterol results were bad
enough. False HIV results would have been disastrous.
His codirector, Mark Pandori, had quit after just five months on the
job. The trigger had been a request he’d made that Elizabeth check in
with them before making representations to the press about
Theranos’s testing capabilities. Sunny had summarily rejected it,
prompting Mark to hand in his resignation that very day. Another
member of the lab had been so troubled by some of the company’s
practices that she told Alan she couldn’t sleep at night. She too had
resigned.
Alan was reaching his own breaking point. A few weeks earlier, he’d
started forwarding dozens of work emails to his personal Gmail
account. He knew forwarding the emails was a risky move because the
company monitored everything, but he wanted to keep a record of the
concerns he’d repeatedly raised with Sunny and Elizabeth. He’d gone a
step further two days earlier and called a law firm in Washington,
D.C., that specialized in representing corporate whistleblowers, but
the person who answered the phone was a “client services specialist.”
He opted to keep the reason for his call vague, wanting to speak only
to an attorney. He did send them one of his email exchanges with
Sunny, but he worried it was hard to understand without additional