When Erika Cheung began her new job at the Silicon Valley start-up company Theranos she thought she was going to work for a company that could make a real difference to millions of peoples’ lives.
However, it wasn’t long before she knew something wasn’t right.
Theranos was the brain child of its charismatic chief executive Elizabeth Holmes.
Holmes claimed to the world and her backers that she had developed a faster, cheaper and more accurate method for blood testing.
However, it was all a lie.
The device was ineffective and inefficient, requiring a lot of work behind the scenes involving labs and workers to achieve the results she said the device would.
The vision Holmes created was built on false promises and empty dreams, although it didn't stop the company from raising billions in venture capital.
It wasn’t until Cheung and a co-worker, who was the grandson of an investor and high-profile US politician, blew the whistle on the company that Holmes’ lie saw daylight.
Cheung told Jesse Mulligan that she was attracted to Theranos straight out of university because of its core beliefs and that it was a Silicon Valley start-up run by a charismatic woman with a strong vision.
However, once on the inside, she noticed the company didn’t live up to its lofty reputation.
“When you’re in a situation like this, you want to be wrong,” she says.
“Part of that was just running a lot of experiments to confirm that the errors I was seeing with this device… every time I was running them on the Theranos devices they (the company) kept indicating they were indicating that I shouldn’t run a patient sample.
“You can’t fight the facts with the experiments that you’re running and what they’re telling you. I think also just the misalignment, I didn’t even necessarily need Theranos to align with my standards of what I felt acceptable, I just needed them to align with their own standards.”
She said difference between what Theranos was telling the world about its device and the reality was stark.
“That was a clear indicator to me that something needed to change,” she says.
Cheung says she tried telling supervisors and the Chief Operating Officer at the company about her concerns, but they fell on deaf ears.
Cheung says the need for transparency and honesty in the bio-tech world has been heightened by the developments of Covid-19 and reassured her that what she did was the right thing.
With no-one in the company willing to listen, Cheung felt she had no option but to tell the world, despite the risk to her safety that she felt.
“The company was very secretive and fearmongering, they constantly told us as employees that if we said anything to anyone then they would sue us.”
Cheung was threatened with litigation by the company after she left and even hired a high-powered lawyer to intimidate her, she says.
“I was very scared for my personal safety and just the outcome of ‘did I do the right thing?’ or even if I did the right thing, what would be the consequences of that, would I end up in jail?
“It was a very stressful and confusing time.”
Even today Cheung believes the Theranos executives are keeping tabs on her, but she’s determined to continue her push holding companies to account.
Cheung and fellow whistleblower Tyler Shultz are now co-founders of a non-profit called Ethics in Entrepreneurship that helps start-ups create a culture of honesty in their companies.
“Our real mission is to lower the barrier of entry for entrepreneurs to… provide a way that they can learn about and embed frameworks of ethics into their companies.”
