By February 2010, after six months on the job, Chelsea had lost all
her enthusiasm for working at Theranos and was thinking of quitting.
She hated Sunny. The Mexico and Thailand projects seemed to be
losing steam as the swine flu pandemic subsided. The company was
lurching from one ill-conceived initiative to another like a child with
attention deficit disorder. On top of it all, Chelsea’s boyfriend lived in
Los Angeles and she was flying back and forth between L.A. and the
Bay Area every weekend to see him. The commute was killing her.
As she debated what to do, something happened that hastened her
decision. One day, the Stanford student whose family connections
Elizabeth had tapped in Mexico came by with his father. Chelsea
wasn’t there to witness the visit, but the office was buzzing about it
afterward. The father was going through some sort of cancer scare.
Upon hearing of his health worries, Elizabeth and Sunny had
convinced him to let Theranos test his blood for cancer biomarkers.
Tony Nugent, who wasn’t there for the encounter either, heard about it
later that day from Gary Frenzel.
“Well, that was interesting,” Gary told Tony, his voice conveying
bewilderment. “We played doctor today.”
Chelsea was appalled. The validation study in Belgium and the
experiments in Mexico and Thailand were one thing. Those were
supposed to be for research purposes only and to have no bearing on
the way patients were treated. But encouraging someone to rely on a
Theranos blood test to make an important medical decision was
something else altogether. Chelsea found it reckless and irresponsible.
She became further alarmed when not long afterward Sunny and
Elizabeth began circulating copies of the requisition forms doctors
used to order blood tests from laboratories and speaking excitedly
about the great opportunities that lay in consumer testing.
I’m done, Chelsea thought to herself. This has crossed too many
lines.
She approached Elizabeth and told her she wanted to resign but
decided to keep her qualms to herself. Instead, she told her friend that
her weekend commutes were taking too great a toll and that she
wanted to move to Los Angeles full-time, which in any case was true.