a big reporting breakthrough and had to remind myself that this was
just the first step in a long process. There was still a lot to understand
and, above all, the story would require corroboration. There was no
way the paper would take it with just one anonymous source, however
good that source might be.
—
THE NEXT TIME Alan and I talked, I was standing in Brooklyn’s
Prospect Park trying to stay warm while keeping a loose eye on my two
boys, ages nine and eleven, as they horsed around with one of their
friends. It was the last Saturday in what would go down in the record
books as New York City’s coldest February in eighty-one years.
I had texted Alan after our first conversation to ask if he could think
of former colleagues who might corroborate what he’d told me. He’d
sent seven names, and I’d made contact with two of them. Both had
been extremely nervous and had only agreed to talk on deep
background. One of them, a former Theranos CLS, wouldn’t say much,
but what she did say gave me confidence that I was on the right track:
she told me she had been very troubled by what was going on at the
company and concerned for patient safety. She’d resigned because she
wasn’t comfortable having her name continue to appear on test
results. The other was a former technical supervisor in the lab who’d
said that Theranos operated under a culture of secrecy and fear.
I told Alan that I felt like I was beginning to make progress, which
he seemed pleased to hear. I asked him whether he had kept the
emails he’d forwarded to his personal Gmail account. My heart sank
when he responded that his lawyer had made him delete them to
comply with the affidavit the company made him sign. Documentary
evidence was the gold standard for these types of stories. This would
make my job much more difficult. I tried not to betray my
disappointment.
Our conversation shifted to proficiency testing. Alan explained how
Theranos was gaming it and he told me which commercial analyzers it
used for the majority of its blood tests. Both were made by Siemens,