indignity.
Loucks was a Yale alumnus and served as a trustee of the Yale
Corporation, the university’s governing body. He was also chairman of
its fund-raising campaign. As he did every year in his capacity as a
trustee, he was scheduled to attend Yale’s commencement exercises in
New Haven, Connecticut, that May.
Through his son Joe, who had graduated from Yale the year before,
Fuisz got in touch with a student named Ben Gordon, who was the
president of the Yale Friends of Israel association. Together, they
organized a graduation day protest featuring “Loucks Is Bad for Yale”
signs and leaflets. The crowning flourish was a turboprop plane Fuisz
hired to fly over the campus trailing a banner that read, “Resign
Loucks.”
Three months later, Loucks stepped down as a Yale trustee.—
DRAWING TOO CLOSE a parallel between Fuisz’s vendetta against
Loucks and the actions he would take with respect to Theranos would
be an oversimplification, however.
As much as he was annoyed by what he perceived as the Holmeses’
ingratitude, Fuisz was also an opportunist. He made his money
patenting inventions he anticipated other companies would someday
want. One of his most lucrative plays involved repurposing a cotton
candy spinner to turn drugs into fast-dissolving capsules. The idea
came to him when he took his daughter to a country fair in
Pennsylvania in the early 1990s. He later sold the public corporation
he formed to house the technology to a Canadian pharmaceutical
company for $154 million and personally pocketed $30 million from
the deal.
After Lorraine relayed what Noel had told her, Fuisz sat down at his
computer in the sprawling seven-bedroom home they occupied in
McLean and googled “Theranos.” The house was so spacious that he
had turned its great room, which had a high vaulted ceiling and a
massive stone fireplace, into his personal study. His Jack Russell liked