online database. However, Theranos didn’t learn of its existence for
another five months until Gary Frenzel, the head of Theranos’s
chemistry team, came across it and called it to Elizabeth’s attention.
By then, the Holmeses and the Fuiszes were no longer on speaking
terms and Fuisz was referring to his patent filing in conversations with
his wife as “the Theranos killer.”
—
THAT SUMMER, Chris Holmes went to see his old friend Chuck Work at
the Washington offices of McDermott Will & Emery, two blocks east of
the White House. Chris and Chuck were longtime friends. They’d met
in 1971 when Chuck gave Chris a ride to an Army Reserve meeting.
Although Chuck was five years older, they’d quickly realized they had a
lot in common: they were both from California and had attended the
same high school and college, the Webb Schools in Claremont,
California, and Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.
Through the years, Chuck had often lent Chris a helping hand. After
Enron collapsed, he let Chris use a visitor’s office at his firm to
conduct his job search. When Elizabeth’s brother, Christian, had to
leave St. John’s high school in Houston because of what Chris
described as a prank involving a film projector, Chuck was able to help
Christian get into Webb because he served on the school’s board. And
when Elizabeth later dropped out of Stanford and needed help filing
her first patent, Chuck put her in touch with colleagues at McDermott
who specialized in that kind of work.
That was precisely the subject of Chris Holmes’s visit on that
summer day in 2008. Chris was agitated. He told Chuck someone
named Richard Fuisz had stolen Elizabeth’s idea and patented it.
Fuisz, Chris noted pointedly, had a son who worked at McDermott
named John. Chuck vaguely knew who John Fuisz was. Their paths
had crossed once or twice at the firm when they’d overlapped on a
case. He was also aware that McDermott had served as Theranos’s
patent attorneys for several years, since he was the one who’d made
the initial introduction. But the rest of what Chris was saying was out