The Dropout (on Disney+) retells the much-reported story of the health-tech fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, but the series also covers the people she had a devastating impact on along the way. One of those people was Ian Gibbons.
Gibbons - played by Stephen Fry in the series - was a respected biochemist with a PHD from Cambridge University, who worked for 30 years in the fields of diagnostic and therapeutic products.
While he was employed at Biotrack Laboratories, Gibbons helped develop a mechanism to dilute and mix liquid samples in blood testing. From this discovery, his colleague on this project, Channing Robertson, then recommended him for a job that was going at a new health-tech startup in Silicon Valley; maybe he’d heard of it? It was called Theranos.
Gibbon’s reputation preceded him, and on arriving to the Theranos lab in 2005 - shortly after recovering from cancer - he was the first experienced scientist hired in the company and was also assigned the role of assay development director; that means he dealt in the analysis of a substance to determine its composition, a key factor in Holmes’ future-facing science.
As seen in The Dropout, Gibbons was a well-liked member of the company, and used his experience to teach the staff about biochemistry and the science of blood testing. He believed that Theranos’s technology and test results needed to, at the very least, match up with their competitors’ diagnostic machines. Theranos - and their device called Edison, which analysed the nanotainer of the finger-prick blood - ran on a need-to-know basis, but even as the highest-ranking scientist on board, Gibbons was excluded from company information. Say, for example, the fact that Holmes was setting up multi-million pound deals to roll out their technology to consumers in Walgreens stores, despite the Edison not technically working.
Because Holmes compartmentalised each department of Theranos, and prohibited colleagues from discussing work with each other, Gibbons was one of the few people who knew that the technology Holmes was shilling to big corporations didn’t work. According to reports, this is what drove him to work at the science, trying to crack this impossible task that Holmes had promised others was a reality. But in John Carreyrou’s expose book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, Gibbons told his wife Rochelle Gibbons: “Nothing at Theranos is working.”
He was vocal about this major problem to Holmes, but it fell on deaf ears. Eventually, he decided to take the issue to the Theranos board of directors. He was fired, but then reinstated a few hours later, to “shut him up,” his widow told The Daily Telegraph.
Things got even more complicated when Holmes tried to sue her childhood neighbour, Richard Fuisz, for allegedly stealing Theranos’ secrets. Fuisz subpoenaed Gibbons - as one of the scientists behind the technology - and wanted him to testify in court. This put Gibbons in a tough spot: testify in court, break his NDA, admit the revolutionary healthcare technology was a sham and lose his job, or lie to protect Holmes, knowing that the public could be harmed, and that Theranos could sue him for leaking trade secrets.
Things were at a breaking point for Gibbons, who stopped going in to work with stress. Then, according to Vanity Fair, on a May evening in 2013, he got a phone call from one of Holmes’s assistants. Afterwards, he said to Rochelle: “Elizabeth wants to meet with me tomorrow in her office. Do you think she’s going to fire me?”. Later that evening, Gibbons attempted suicide, was rushed to hospital and died of liver failure, aged 67, a week later.
Gibbons’s widow claims that on learning of her husband's death, Elizabeth Holmes never reached out to her, and instead had one of her staff call Rochelle to demand that she immediately return Gibbons’s computer and any confidential information pertaining to Theranos.
Gibbons never lived to see Holmes face justice for her actions. But after Holmes’s conviction in January 2022 of four counts of fraud, Gibbon’s widow told The Daily Mail: “'Ian would be very happy. He was a very kind, tolerant person but he hated her so much — she was a sociopath, a narcissist, a bully and a liar.
“When he realised she was pushing things on patients that were fraudulent, it destroyed him.”
The Dropout is streaming on Disney+ from March 3.
If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health or suicidal thoughts, contact Samaritans on 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org
