Absurd.
Did Theranos really have any new technology? I asked
provocatively.
Boies’s temper flared again. Testing tiny finger-stick samples was
something no one in the laboratory industry had been able to do
before, he fumed. “Theranos is doing it and, unless it’s magic, it’s a
new technology!”
“It sounds like the Wizard of Oz,” Jay quipped.
We continued going around in circles, never getting a straight
answer about how many tests Theranos performed on the Edison
versus commercial analyzers. It was frustrating but also a sign that I
was on the right track. They wouldn’t be stonewalling if they had
nothing to hide.
The meeting dragged on in this manner for four more hours. As we
continued going through my list of questions, Young did answer some
of them without invoking trade secrets. He acknowledged problems
with Theranos’s potassium test but claimed they had quickly been
solved and none of the faulty results had been released to any patients.
Alan Beam had told me otherwise, so I suspected Young was lying
about that. Young also confirmed that Theranos conducted proficiency
testing differently than most laboratories but argued this was justified
by the uniqueness of its technology. He also confirmed that the CLIA
inspector hadn’t seen the Normandy part of Theranos’s lab during her
inspection but claimed she had been informed of its existence.
One of his answers struck me as odd. When I brought up the
Hematology Reports study Holmes had coauthored, Young
immediately dismissed it as outdated. It had been conducted with
older Theranos technology and its data were ancient, dating back to
2008, he said. Why then had Holmes cited it to The New Yorker? I
wondered. It seemed Theranos was now distancing itself from it,
probably because it was conscious of its flimsiness.
I asked about Ian Gibbons. Young acknowledged that Ian had been
an important contributor in the company’s early years but said his
behavior had become erratic at the end of his life and implied that he