- Hulu’s The Dropout features whistleblower Erika Cheung, who helped alert officials to Elizabeth Holmes’ fraud.
- Erika raised the alarm along with two other whistleblowers who were also suspicious of the company and its technology.
- She shared her story with the Washington Post and testified against Holmes in court.
Viewers are officially obsessed with the new Hulu miniseries, The Dropout. The show tells the true story of how Elizabeth Holmes (played by Amanda Seyfried) swindled investors and the world alike into funding (and believing in) the science behind her company Theranos, which she claimed developed a number of Diseases in humans could be diagnosed by passing a single drop of blood through a device invented by Holmes called the Edison. (She even got Walgreens to invest.)
Among the real people who have witnessed the rise and fall of Theranos is Erika Cheung, a whistleblower who blew up the Theranos facade along with former collaborators Tyler Shultz and Adam Rosendorff. In 2020, Erika gave a TED Talk where she shared how she was introduced to Theranos at a job fair after graduating from the University of California Berkeley in 2013.
In Hulu’s The Dropout, Erika is played by Camryn Mi-young Kim, who first appears in Episode 6 of the series, which released March 24. But what happened to Erika Cheung in real life and where is the show now?
What role did Erika play as the Theranos whistleblower?
She worked with her fellow whistleblowers – one of them Tyler – to reveal that the technology didn’t actually work. Tyler, per NPR, shared that he quickly realized something was wrong with the Edison device. “There’s nothing the Edison could do that I couldn’t do with a pipette in my own hand,” he said.
He also discovered that Theranos did not use the Edison when conducting quality control security audits, but instead used off-the-shelf laboratory equipment.
“It was clear that there was an open secret within Theranos, that this technology just didn’t exist,” Tyler said.
Erika noticed the same things. “You’d have about the same luck if you flipped a coin whether your results were right or wrong,” she testified at Holmes’ trial, according to CNBC. “It was worrying to see this level of error, which was not typical of a normal laboratory.”
She and Tyler confirmed their stories and also informed Shultz’s grandfather, former US Secretary of State and Theranos board member George Shultz.
“It became very uncomfortable and very stressful for me to work at the company,” Erika said via CNBC. “I tried to tell as many people as possible, but people just didn’t get it.”
When Erika left the company, she received a letter from Theranos’ attorneys “said they had reason to believe she disclosed confidential company information,” according to the Washington Post. She told her story to an investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal, who published an investigative article on Theranos in 2015, raising alarm.
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“For me, it seemed like a kind of last resort to find out the truth about what happened to these patient samples,” Erika said.
What is Erika Cheung doing today?
According to her LinkedIn, Erika is a co-founder of Ethics in Entrepreneurship and describes herself as “a medical researcher turned technology and innovation ecosystem builder”. You can find them too Twitterwhere she made a hilarious reference to her crazy Theranos experience in 2021.
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The Dropout airs Thursdays on Hulu.
Emily Shiffer Emily Shiffer was a former men’s health and prevention digital web producer and is currently a freelance writer specializing in health, weight loss and fitness.
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