When General James Mattis joined the Theranos board in 2013, he had already spent a year pushing Elizabeth Holmes's fingerprick blood analyser toward soldiers in Afghanistan, and the only reason it never reached the battlefield was an Army regulatory officer named David Shoemaker who kept warning the FDA the device was not approved. (opens in new tab)

General James Mattis joined the Theranos board of directors in July 2013, a few months after retiring as head of US Central Command, and the first thing he had been trying to do for more than a year by that point was put Elizabeth Holmes’s fingerprick blood analyser into the hands of soldiers in Afghanistan. […]