Scientist who killed himself ‘thought billionaire boss was about to sack him’
A LEADING British scientist committed suicide amid fears that his billionaire boss was going to fire him, his wife has claimed.
Cambridge graduate Ian Gibbons was allegedly struggling to get specialised one-prick blood tests created by a Silicon Valley bio-tech company to work.
The technology – which claimed to be able to detect more than 240 conditions ranging from cholesterol problems to cancer – made the company’s chief executive, 32-year-old Elizabeth Holmes, the richest self-made woman in America, with a net worth of £3.4billion in 2015.
But Dr Gibbons, 67, a biochemist who had recently been diagnosed with cancer, did not think it was working properly, However, he felt pressured to back the company, Theranos, because of a lawsuit it was facing.
Dr Gibbons’ wife Rochelle said he killed himself hours after Miss Holmes called him in for a meeting because he was worried he was going to be fired.
‘Ian felt like he would lose his job if he told the truth,’ Mrs Gibbons told Vanity Fair magazine. ‘Ian was a real obstacle for Elizabeth. He started to be very vocal.’
Theranos has been plagued by problems since Dr Gibbons’ death and Miss Holmes’s fortune recently plummeted to zero amid claims that the blood-testing firm she founded in 2003 produced inaccurate tests and was being investigated by federal agencies, including the FBI.
Theranos, based in Palo Alto, California, the heart of the US high-tech industry, claimed that Dr Gibbons was hardly in its office because of his health problems and had told people connected to the company that its products were ready for the commercial market. Theranos’s problems escalated in 2012 when it decided to sue Richard Fuisz, an old friend of Miss Holmes’s family, alleging that he had stolen the company’s secrets.
Mr Fuisz’s lawyers in turn issued subpoenas to executives at the firm. Dr Gibbons, its chief scientist, did not want to give evidence over fears that he would have to reveal his concerns with the technology in court and the fact that he was still trying to get it to work. He was also concerned he would harm the people who worked alongside him, Vanity Fair reported. Miss Holmes allegedly grew frustrated with Dr Gibbons and his unwillingness to testify.
Mrs Gibbons claims her husband received a call from one of Miss Holmes’s assistants on May 16, 2013, asking him to come to a meeting in her office the next day. ‘Do you think she’s going to fire me?’ he asked his wife. ‘Yes,’ she replied.
Hours later he tried to commit suicide and was taken to hospital. But he died from his injuries a week later.
Theranos had said it could use its Edison machines to get comprehensive test results on a patient in four hours with just a finger prick of blood – at a cost of $30 (£22) a time.
But it emerged last year that scientists were even using other lab machines to obtain results and in July this year the company was banned from running the tests for two years, although it is appealing.
A spokesman for Theranos told Mail Online that it had nothing to add and would not comment on the claims about Dr Gibbons’s suicide.