asking around, I finally located him in a room in the materials science
building.
Tyler wasn’t surprised to see me. Erika had given me his real email
address and I’d written to him to let him know I was coming back
through town. He’d been noncommittal about meeting with me. Now
that I was there, though, he relented. We walked over to a nearby
cafeteria to grab some lunch and slipped into easy banter.
Tyler seemed in good spirits. He told me he was part of a small
group of researchers at Stanford that had teamed up with a Canadian
company to compete in the multimillion-dollar Qualcomm Tricorder
XPRIZE competition. They were trying to build a portable device
capable of diagnosing a dozen diseases from a person’s blood, saliva,
and vital signs.
When our conversation turned to Theranos, his brows furrowed and
he tensed up. He didn’t want to discuss the subject in an open place
within earshot of other people, he said. He suggested we walk back to
the materials science building. We found an empty classroom there
and sat down. His relaxed demeanor in the cafeteria had given way to
palpable anxiety.
“My lawyers forbade me from talking to you, but I can’t keep this
bottled up anymore,” he said.
I agreed to keep whatever he was about to tell me off the record and
only to write about it in the future if he gave me his permission to do
so.
For the next forty-five minutes, I listened dismayed as Tyler told me
about the ambush at his grandfather’s house and the months of legal
threats he’d endured. Despite it all, he had never buckled. He had
steadfastly refused to sign any document Boies Schiller had put to him.
If not for his courage and the more than $400,000 his parents had
spent on his attorneys, I might never have been able to get my first
article published, I realized. I felt pangs of guilt for having put him
through such an ordeal.
The most heartbreaking part of it all was Tyler’s estrangement from
his grandfather. George Shultz had continued to side with Holmes in