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But I also quickly became aware that he had once been a source - 20, 25 years prior - of a colleague of mine who had written a couple of front-page stories using Fuisz. I was very well aware that Richard Fuisz, having been involved in litigation and having lost that patent litigation, was a biased source and had an axe to grind. Were your instincts pointing in the other direction?Ĭarreyrou: No. Talk to us a little bit about how you got from there to the process of eventually unraveling this whole thing. You’ve got a wonky policy blog that comes to you from almost a litigation addict, who has all of the reasons in the world to try to rake Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos over the coals. To find parallels to it without becoming hyperbolic, it really reads like Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men, or to go back further, to Ida Tarbell’s taking on Standard Oil.īut John, I’ve got a question for you. When the book came out, I’ve got to say I read it in about two sittings. I had been teaching Theranos in the business responsibility core class for Wharton MBAs since John broke the story in October 2015.
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Peter Conti-Brown: That understates the extraordinary lengths you went to to confirm all of this. Based on that first conversation, I became convinced that this was a fraud, and it became a game of corroboration from there. I eventually got in touch with the former lab director and had a long first conversation with him. But I heard that there was this primary source of information out there, and if I could just get in touch with this person, then I might be able to get somewhere. I was cognizant of the fact that the first person who tipped me off was removed by several degrees from the primary source of information. The employee was alleging all manner of wrongdoing. Fuisz had just made contact with a Theranos employee who had just left the company, and the employee was the former lab director. That person, Richard Fuisz, had become suspicious that Theranos was a scam. He wrote a short, skeptical item on his blog and was contacted by someone who had been involved in patent litigation with Elizabeth Holmes. I got a tip from a pathologist in the Midwest who moonlighted as the writer of a blog called “The Pathology Blawg.” He had read a profile of Elizabeth Holmes in The New Yorker and was immediately dubious about the claims she made in that story about her technology’s ability to test tiny blood samples and to run so many tests on tiny blood samples. John Carreyrou: Yes, it was not a primary source. In this case, your investigation began with a tip from a friend of a friend, correct?
Wharton business ethics and legal studies professor Peter Conti-Brown, who teaches about Theranos for the business responsibility core class for Wharton MBAs, also joined the discussion.Īn edited transcript of the conversation Journalists often get tips from their sources. He visited the radio show, which airs on Wharton Business Radio on SiriusXM, to talk about the story. Carreyrou has chronicled the saga in a book titled, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. Holmes and former Theranos president Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani have been indicted on federal fraud charges. An investigation by Wall Street Journal reporter John Carr eyrou uncovered the truth that led to the company’s downfall. Holmes, a striking blonde with a bold presence, racked up big-name investors, forged a partnership with Walgreens and raked in the money: Theranos reached a valuation of $9 billion.īut this story of a Silicon Valley unicorn was too good to be true. In 2003, the 19-year-old college dropout founded Theranos, a medical technology company that promised to revolutionize health care with a device that could test for a range of conditions using just a few drops of blood from a finger prick. Elizabeth Holmes had the world on a string.