Even after medics started spotting wild discrepancies in tests carried out on Theranos equipment in the drugstore chain’s pharmacies, the work continued, and business exploded once a gift-card offer was introduced. This emerged well after the secretive company had gone live with a $400 million Walgreens deal in Arizona, promoted in a touchy-feely ad campaign shot by Errol Morris. In truth, Theranos was performing only around a dozen tests using its own faulty technology while the majority apparently were being done with intravenously drawn blood samples on industry-standard equipment in alarmingly lax lab conditions. Using information from whistleblowers corroborated by various former employees, Carreyrou dismantled Holmes’ claim that her company had developed proprietary technology capable of carrying out upwards of 200 tests from a single fingertip pin-prick blood sample. In reality, of course, it was an out-of-control sham, a hall of mirrors, and Parloff was far from the only smart person duped. A year and a half after that feature, Parloff published a mea culpa detailing how he had been misled into buying Holmes’ promise of a complete revolution in blood diagnostic testing as a done deal. There’s an unexpectedly emotional moment in Alex Gibney’s riveting investigation for HBO, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, when Fortune reporter Roger Parloff, who had written a 2014 cover profile on Elizabeth Holmes and her news-making startup Theranos, gets so choked up by the ethical violation of his subject’s elaborate deception he can barely speak.