This story is adapted from Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou.

Alan Beam was sitting in his office reviewing lab reports when Theranos CEO and founder Elizabeth Holmes poked her head in and asked him to follow her. She wanted to show him something. They stepped outside the lab into an area of open office space where other employees had gathered. At her signal, a technician pricked a volunteer’s finger, then applied a transparent plastic implement shaped like a miniature rocket to the blood oozing from it. This was the Theranos sample collection device. Its tip collected the blood and transferred it to two little engines at the rocket’s base. The engines weren’t really engines: They were nanotainers. To complete the transfer, you pushed the nanotainers into the belly of the plastic rocket like a plunger. The movement created a vacuum that sucked the blood into them.

Or at least that was the idea. But in this instance, things didn’t go quite as planned. When the technician pushed the tiny twin tubes into the device, there was a loud pop and blood splattered everywhere. One of the nanotainers had just exploded.

Holmes looked unfazed. “OK, let’s try that again,” she said calmly.

Beam1 wasn’t sure what to make of the scene. He’d only been working at Theranos, the Silicon Valley company that promised to offer fast, cheap blood tests from a single drop of blood, for a few weeks and was still trying to get his bearings.

Excerpted from Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou, Buy on Amazon Knopf

He knew the nanotainer was part of the company’s proprietary blood-testing system, but he’d never seen one in action before. He hoped this was just a small mishap that didn’t portend bigger problems.

The lanky pathologist’s circuitous route to Silicon Valley had started in South Africa, where he grew up. After majoring in English at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (“Wits” to South Africans), he’d moved to the United States to take premed classes at Columbia University in New York City. The choice was guided by his conservative Jewish parents, who considered only a few professions acceptable for their son: law, business, and medicine.

Beam had stayed in New York for medical school, enrolling at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, but he quickly realized that some aspects of being a doctor didn’t suit his temperament. Put off by the crazy hours and the sights and smells of the hospital ward, he gravitated toward the more sedate specialty of laboratory science, which led to postdoctoral studies in virology and a residency in clinical pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

In the summer of 2012, Beam was running the lab of a children’s hospital in Pittsburgh when he noticed a job posting on LinkedIn that dovetailed perfectly with his budding fascination with Silicon Valley: laboratory director at a Palo Alto biotech firm. He had just finished reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. The book, which he’d found hugely inspiring, had cemented his desire to move out to the San Francisco Bay Area.

about the author John Carreyrou is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal. For his extensive coverage of Theranos, Carreyrou was awarded the George Polk Award for Financial Reporting, the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism in the category of beat reporting, and the Barlett & Steele Silver Award for Investigative Business Journalism.

After he applied for the job, Beam was asked to fly out for an interview scheduled for 6 pm on a Friday. The timing seemed odd but he was happy to oblige. He met with COO Sunny Balwani first and then with Holmes. There was something about Balwani that he found vaguely creepy, but that impression was more than offset by Holmes, who came off as very earnest in her determination to transform health care. Like many people who met her for the first time, Beam was taken aback by her deep voice. It was unlike anything he’d heard before.

At the time, Theranos was on the cusp of becoming a tech darling. Founded by the charismatic Stanford dropout in 2003, its promises to revolutionize blood-testing—and by extension, the vast industry of medical diagnostics—would be swallowed whole by most of the technology press, which would lavish Holmes with glowing coverage. (WIRED was not exempt). Only later—in October 2015—would the truth come out: Theranos was a fraud built on secrecy, deliberate fabrication, and hype. After I revealed that fraud, the company would begin an implosion that continues to this day.

Beam had no way of knowing any of this when he accepted Theranos’ job offer in August 2012. The lab he inherited was divided into two parts: a room on the building’s second floor that was filled with commercial diagnostic equipment, and a second room beneath it where research was being conducted. The upstairs room was the federally certified part of the lab, the one Beam was responsible for. Balwani and Holmes viewed its conventional machines as dinosaurs that would soon be rendered extinct by Theranos’s revolutionary technology, so they called it “Jurassic Park.” They called the downstairs room “Normandy” in reference to the D-day landings during World War II. The proprietary Theranos devices it contained would take the lab industry by storm, like the Allied troops who braved hails of machine-gun fire on Normandy’s beaches to liberate Europe from Nazi occupation.