How Theranos misled a Fortune reporter

Roger Parloff, a Fortune reporter who wrote a June 2014 cover story on Theranos and founder Elizabeth Holmes, writes Thursday about how the company misled him on the number of blood tests it was performing without a syringe.

Parloff writes, “As much as I’d like to say that Holmes lied to me, I don’t think she did. I do believe I was misled — intentionally — but I was also culpable, in that I failed to probe certain exasperatingly opaque answers that I repeatedly received.

“‘We do routine, specialty, and esoteric tests,’ Holmes told me in May 2014. ‘What we’ve done is take those, and develop the chemistry and analytic systems that made it possible to run them on a microsystem.’

“When I started my research in March 2014, there were maybe something like 100 tests listed on Theranos’s online test menu. The number was gradually climbing as my work continued. By the time I was ready to publish there were 214 tests listed. I assumed that meant they had now adapted 214 tests to run on their microsystem.

“In fact, at the time I didn’t know what else it could have meant. That’s because, so far as I can tell, at the time of my research the company had never revealed that it ever used conventional, nonproprietary analyzers to perform the tests it listed on its menu other than for research purposes.”

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