Theranos Whistleblower on Lessons Learned: I 'Would Have Hired a Lawyer'

pcmag.com:

COPENHAGEN—Becoming a witness to corporate misconduct can be one of those life changes that happens gradually and then suddenly(Opens in a new window), one of the principal Theranos whistleblowers said at a tech conference here on Thursday.

"I had no idea what a whistleblower was,” recalled Erika Cheung, now co-founder and executive director of the nonprofit Ethics in Entrepreneurship(Opens in a new window), in an onstage interview at TechBBQ(Opens in a new window). 

Hired after college at Theranos, Cheung told interviewer Robin Wauters, editor in chief at Tech.EU(Opens in a new window), that she didn’t think she’d uncovered an extinction-level event for Theranos when she saw indications that the promising blood-testing startup’s Edison device wasn’t delivering on its advertised mission of providing quick and accurate diagnostics from a single drop of blood. 

So she did what any good employee would and tried reporting the problem internally. "I didn't want to be right,” she said. “I wanted to be able to basically see this thing through."

But a pattern of run-around responses along the lines of “run another experiment,” combined with an corporate undercurrent of “fear and secrecy," left Cheung realizing company management had different ideas of seeing this through.

"It became very clear that they had known about these issues but they weren't doing anything about it,” she told Wauters.

Cheung tipped off the Wall Street Journal’s John Carreyrou, whose October 2015 report(Opens in a new window) blew up a bubble of positive publicity for Theranos, as well as federal authorities. She later spent three days testifying against CEO Elizabeth Holmes in the federal trial that ended with that founder convicted(Opens in a new window)