in search of job leads and business advice. With one of his sons from a
previous marriage, Fuisz had started a new company around one of his
inventions: a thin strip that dissolved in the mouth and delivered
drugs to the bloodstream faster than traditional pills. He and his son,
Joe, ran it from a suite of offices in Great Falls, Virginia.
Chris Holmes came in looking haggard and glum, Joe Fuisz recalls.
He mused aloud about trying his hand at consulting and indicated that
he and Noel were desperate to move back to Washington. Having just
purchased a new house in the affluent Beltway suburb of McLean,
Richard Fuisz offered him use of the one he and Lorraine had just
vacated across the street, rent-free. They hadn’t bothered to list it yet.
Chris mouthed a “thank you” but didn’t take him up on the offer.
—
CHRIS AND NOEL HOLMES DID eventually move back to Washington
four years later when Chris got a job at the World Wildlife Fund. At
first, they stayed with friends in Great Falls while they looked for a
new place to live. As Noel toured houses, she called Lorraine
frequently to update her on her search.
Over lunch one day, the topic turned to Elizabeth and what she was
up to. Noel proudly told Lorraine that her daughter had invented a
wrist device that could analyze a person’s blood and started a company
to commercialize it. The reality was that Theranos was already moving
on from Elizabeth’s original patch idea at that point, but that lost
nuance hardly mattered in the chain of events Noel’s lunchtime
confidence unleashed.
When she got home, Lorraine repeated what Noel had told her to
her husband, thinking it might be of interest to him as a fellow medical
inventor. What she probably didn’t anticipate is how he would react.
Richard Fuisz was a vain and prideful man. The thought that the
daughter of longtime friends and former neighbors would launch a
company in his area of expertise and that they wouldn’t ask for his
help or even consult him deeply offended him. As he would put it years
later in an email, “The fact that the Holmes family was so willing to