DNAosis

DNAosis: An epic tale of outlandish entitlement

DISCLAIMER: This is a work of parody. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or in any way authorized by Elizabeth Holmes, Sunny Ramesh Balwani, or any former employees, advisors, board members, investors or associates of the company formerly known as Theranos. It is intended for parody use only and is protected in the United States under the Fair Use doctrine (17 U.S.C. § 107).

The mirror in the dorm hall bathroom was slightly warped, cheap glass in a cheap metal frame. Corrine Corkel stood in front of it at 4 am, practicing her speech.

“This will change the medical world as we know it,” she said. “This will revolutionize everything."

Her voice was higher than she wanted, with a valley girl vocal fry. She took a breath from somewhere lower, attempting a booming bravado from the very bottom of her register.

“The diagnostic process as we know it will be revolutionized.”

Not there yet, but better. Keep going, Corrine.

She’d been doing this for nearly two weeks in the bathroom when the hall was quiet and all the others on her floor were asleep. Practicing for her inevitable investor pitches.

She'd ingested enough footage of Steve Jobs recently to understand that a vision required a shiny, inspiring vessel. You had to make people feel like you were the most important person in the room, the person who held access to revolutionary technology that could unlock answers. Only then would they believe in your vision.

Corrine was still working on that particular flair of bravado and charm.

“The process will be revolutionary," she continued. “It will change the medical field as we know it."

There was no revolution yet; only Corrine and her new patent. She’d recently filed for an inner cheek patch that could sample the wearer's DNA; a single patch that could monitor saliva and run hundreds of health screens simultaneously, a health panel at your fingertips. There was sweet, supportive Professor Morrison, who believed in her and supported her vision wholeheartedly.

Then there was Professor Garmin, who sat across from her in her cold office, telling Corrine that what she was describing was not yet possible within current scientific limits.

Corrine thanked her for her time, then put dour old Professor Garmin's doubts out of her mind entirely. How did the saying go? Never take advice from people whose lives you didn't want to live yourself. And Professor Garmin was a status quo kind of person, not a visionary. Not in the fucking slightest.

She thought about the way Garmin had sized her up, with the certainty of someone who saw a lot of enthusiastic students and ideas over the years and enjoyed deflating each and every one of them. What a buzzkill, Corrine thought. And here she thought Garmin would be a slam dunk, would want to support a woman inventor like herself.

She turned off the water she’d been running, dried her hands on her sweatpants, and took another look at herself in the warped mirror. Same Corrine, just with a slightly more practiced voice. And every bit of practice added up. She went back to her dorm room before anyone else was up.

The room was small and tidy; Corrine was a clean minimalist. Her laptop was open, next to it was a legal pad covered in squished handwriting, a biography of Steve Jobs, and her tumbler half full of coffee.

A single index card was displayed above the desk in neon yellow.

What would you do if you knew you couldn't fail?

She’d written it in Sharpie the first week she'd started here, and it had become part of the room now, familiar and nearly invisible.

Corrine sat down at the desk and looked down at the legal pad.

Her new company was called Diagnose Me. She’d incorporated it in that brief window when she still believed she could still be a Stanford student and build a real business.

She’d filed the patent herself, pulling together enough technical language from sources to describe what she was envisioning: a wearable cheek patch that could monitor saliva and determine your likelihood of a whole panel of diseases. A revolutionary device that would cut the need to send DNA samples to companies and provide more certainty, eliminating the middle man altogether.

The idea had come to her in Frankfurt, Germany in the lab at a hybrid Genome Institute the summer after her freshman year. She’d been testing blood samples, drawing blood with syringes the old way, the way it had always been done, and she’d thought: there must be a better way. What if you could diagnose with saliva instead?

What if a small patch on your inner cheek could send data to your phone, constant, real-time, the way a weather app tracked barometric pressure; except it was tracking cortisol levels, your glucose, the early markers of a hundred different conditions, and it was sending that data to a drive. You could choose who to share the drive with, allowing a doctor to treat the early signs of the thing that would have killed you at sixty that started building at thirty-five.

It was freaking genius. And she would find someone who could build it for her, who could help her make it a reality.

The ancestry-tracing companies were already doing the early stages of something like this — she’d read a study once, a Stanford bioengineering paper, something about salivary biomarker detection, the specifics slightly beyond her but the general principle clear enough — so why couldn’t she build something more in depth? Something that encompassed real-time monitoring, that cut out the third-party lab entirely. She had gone back to her dorm room in Frankfurt at the time and written for nearly four hours without stopping.

Corrine filed the patent application the week she arrived back in the United States.

She sat at her desk, pulling up the email draft she’d been working on addressed to her parents.

Her father, John Carter Corkel, worked in government. Policy work, the kind of career Corrine had observed since childhood, with the private knowing that policy was much too pedantic for her.

Her mother, Ruby Corkel, had been a socialite since before Corrine was born. Sharp and beautiful, Ruby never missed out on organizing stunning Cotillion balls that everyone talked about for ages. They were good parents by all normal standards, attentive and loving. And John Carter had spent a considerable amount of money on a Stanford education... an education that Corrine was about to tell them she was no longer pursuing.

Reading the draft back to herself, she realized she was over-explaining. Explaining was defensive. Explaining was asking for permission, it was weak. A decision had already been made. Her decision.

Corrine deleted it all and started over.

Dad, Mom —

I’m leaving Stanford. I’ve thought about this for a long time and I want you to know it’s not a decision I’ve made lightly. I have an important company I need to build, and I can’t build it here anymore.

She stopped. Looked up at the index card.

What would you do if you knew you couldn't fail?

Corrine was going to build her company, and she was going to start building before she was entirely ready, before she had the team assembled, or investors lined up. She didn't need that anyway. She was going to use the tuition money as seed funding; it was hers, she’d earned it. Plus she’d always handled money carefully, and was confident she could get this up and running and find investors.

She finished typing the email.

I’ll tell you more when I see you. I’m not asking you to understand right now, I just need you to know. And I need you to trust me.

There will be no talking me out of this.

I love you both.

C.C.

She read it once over again, then hit send before she could back out.

There was nothing left to do now except pack up her dorm and get on the road.

“This is going to change medicine as we know it,” she declared to her room, ripping off the card from the wall, before promptly falling back asleep.

She slept soundly and didn't wake up for a long while.

Later that afternoon, she packed up her dorm room and drove to Palo Alto. Thankfully, she had already thought to withdraw her tuition money the day before so she could move it to her own private account.

The company would eventually be called DNAosis, DNA plus diagnosis, a word she’d come up with sitting in traffic on the 101. The office would be a small space in East Palo Alto, and the technology would prove harder than she’d planned, more resistant, more complex in its engineering than any single patent could contain.

But that was to come later.

For now, she was driving south on a Tuesday afternoon with the windows down and the radio blaring and the absolute, unshakeable conviction that she was going to change everything.

She had decided already. And what Corrine decided on, Corrine made happen.