Tyler Shultz was only an employee of Theranos (pictured above) for eight months before he left the company. As a Theranos lab employee, he quickly pieced together that the promised technology, a blood-testing device called Edison, didn’t deliver on any of its promises (via NPR). According to Shultz, who at that point was a fresh graduate with a biology degree from Stanford University under his belt, it was only four days into his Theranos gig that he made a startling observation — that the technology Elizabeth Holmes had promised investors simply wasn’t there.
“The biggest red flag at that point was actually seeing the technology,” he told journalist Christiane Amanpour in a 2020 interview (via PBS). “I was expecting some fancy microfluidic technology and some signal transduction method that I had never dreamed of. But what it was just a pipette inside of a box on a robotic arm.” After this, Shultz voiced his concerns within the company but received no response. Later on, Shultz eventually used an alias to report the company to regulators and then helped alert the public about the goings-on at Theranos as a source for Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou, per NPR. With Shultz’s help and the assistance of his colleague Erika Cheung, Carreyrou revealed the truth about Theranos to the public in the first of a series of Wall Street Journal exposés in 2015.
