which was proportional to the intensity of the light.
This blood-testing technique was known as a chemiluminescent
immunoassay. (In laboratory speak, the word “assay” is synonymous
with “blood test.”) The technique was not new: it had been pioneered
in the early 1980s by a professor at Cardiff University. But Tony had
automated it inside a machine that, though bigger than the toaster-size
Theranos 1.0, was still small enough to make Elizabeth’s vision of
placing it in patients’ homes possible. And it only required about 50
microliters of blood. That was more than the 10 microliters Elizabeth
initially insisted upon, but it still amounted to just a drop.
By September 2007, four months after he’d started building it, Tony
had a functioning prototype. One that performed far more reliably
than the balky system Ed Ku was still laboring on in another part of
the office.
Tony asked Elizabeth what she wanted to call it.
“We tried everything else and it failed, so let’s call it the Edison,” she
said.
What some employees had taken to derisively calling the “gluebot”
was suddenly the new way forward. And it now had a far more
respectable name, inspired by the man widely considered to be
America’s greatest inventor.
The decision to abandon the microfluidic system in favor of the
Edison was ironic given that Theranos had just filed a lawsuit to
protect the intellectual property underpinning the former. It was also
bad news for Ed Ku.
One morning a few weeks before Thanksgiving, Ed and his
engineers were called into a conference room one after the other.
When it was Ed’s turn, Tony, a human resources manager named Tara
Lencioni, and the lawyer Michael Esquivel informed him that he was
being let go. The company was heading in a new direction and it didn’t
involve what he was working on, they said. Ed would have to sign a
new nondisclosure and nondisparagement agreement if he wanted to
get his severance. Lencioni and Esquivel walked him to his workspace
to retrieve a few personal belongings and then escorted him out of the