When I asked him what made him think that, he revealed a new
anecdote. The Shultz family tradition was to celebrate Thanksgiving at
the former secretary of state’s home. When Tyler, his brother, and his
parents had arrived at his grandfather’s house that day, they’d come
face-to-face with Holmes and her parents. George had invited them
too. A mere seven months had passed since Tyler’s resignation and the
wounds were still fresh, but he had been forced to act as if nothing had
happened. The awkward dinner conversation had drifted from
California’s drought to the bulletproof windows in the new Theranos
headquarters. For Tyler, the most excruciating moment had been
when Holmes got up and gave a toast expressing her love and
appreciation for every member of the Shultz family. He said he’d
barely been able to contain himself.
Tyler and Erika were both very young and had been junior
employees at Theranos, but I found them credible as sources because
so much of what they told me corroborated what Alan Beam had said.
I was also impressed by their sense of ethics. They felt strongly that
what they had witnessed was wrong and were willing to take the risk of
speaking to me to right that wrong.
I next met up with Phyllis Gardner, the Stanford medical school
professor Holmes had consulted about her original patch idea when
she’d dropped out of college twelve years earlier. Phyllis gave me a
tour of the Stanford campus and its surroundings. As we drove around
in her car, I was struck by how small and insular Palo Alto was.
Phyllis’s home was just down the hill from George Shultz’s big
shingled house, and both were on land owned by Stanford. When
Phyllis walked her dog, she sometimes ran into Channing Robertson.
The Hoover Institution building where George Shultz and the other
Theranos board members had offices was right in the middle of the
campus. The new Theranos headquarters on Page Mill Road was less
than two miles away on land that was also owned by Stanford. In a
strange twist, Phyllis told me the site used to be a Wall Street Journal
printing plant.
On the last day of my trip, I met Rochelle Gibbons for lunch at
Rangoon Ruby, a Burmese restaurant in Palo Alto. It had been two