Phyllis Gardner, who as a pharmacology professor at Stanford told Elizabeth Holmes that her idea for a new blood-testing technology would fail, and later became a critical source in the investigation that led to Ms. Holmes’s conviction in one of the biggest fraud cases in U.S. history, died on Sept. 10 while on vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, in Massachusetts. She was 75.
Her husband, Andrew Perlman, said the cause was a heart attack.
Dr. Gardner was already a respected scientist and entrepreneur when Ms. Holmes first walked into her office in 2002.
Trained at Harvard, Dr. Gardner had joined the Stanford faculty in 1984 after a string of prestigious fellowships, during which she honed her expertise in clinical pharmacology.
After taking a leave of absence from 1994 to 1996 to work as the vice president for research at Alza Corporation, a biotech company, she became increasingly involved in medical start-ups, serving on boards and offering advice to ambitious Stanford students and graduates.
Dr. Gardner was especially eager to help women — which is how she ended up meeting Ms. Holmes, an undergraduate chemical engineering student who arrived with an idea for a patch that would analyze a patient’s blood and then deliver antibiotics as necessary.
Dr. Gardner listened carefully and then explained why the project would fail. Among other issues, she raised the problem that antibiotics don’t work in the very small doses Ms. Holmes proposed.
When Ms. Holmes returned several weeks later for another meeting, she seemed not to have taken any of Dr. Gardner’s advice.
“She really didn’t want input,” Dr. Gardner told the “Danny in the Valley” podcast in 2019. “She didn’t want anyone telling her things.”
Frustrated, Dr. Gardner suggested that Ms. Holmes talk to Mr. Perlman, her husband and a biotech investor. He joined an advisory committee set up by Ms. Holmes, though it only met briefly before she disbanded it.
Dr. Gardner watched with growing concern as Ms. Holmes moved ahead with her new company, Theranos, after dropping out of Stanford in 2004. Over the next decade, Ms. Holmes amassed $700 million in investor capital and put together a board of directors with estimable government figures like Gen. James Mattis, George Shultz and Henry Kissinger — but just one doctor, Bill Frist, the former senator from Tennessee.
By then, she was pitching a different product, a device that could analyze blood using microscopic samples, but it was based on many of the same ideas on which Dr. Gardner had cast doubt.
“She was going to make it work and follow the model of ‘try it until you succeed,’” Dr. Gardner said on a 2019 podcast about Theranos, “The Dropout.” “That is so completely ridiculous in terms of health care. When you have people’s lives at risk, you don’t do that.”
Dr. Gardner spoke to others about her concerns. But for years, few listened.
“I really felt like I was in the wilderness,” she said on “Danny in the Valley.”
Finally, in the early 2010s, she got a call from Richard Fuisz, a friend of Ms. Holmes’s family and an early investor in the company. He was having doubts as well. She told him she thought the whole idea was “crazy.”
Soon she was in touch with other skeptics, and then the reporter John Carreyrou from The Wall Street Journal (now at The New York Times).
In October 2015, after months of investigation, Mr. Carreyrou published his first story on Theranos, documenting how the company had covered up flaws in its technology.
The article included a damning quote about Ms. Holmes from Dr. Gardner: “She was a young kid with only rudimentary engineering training and no medical training.”
In 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Ms. Holmes and Ramesh Balwani, the president of Theranos, with defrauding investors. She was convicted in 2022 and sentenced to more than 11 years in prison.
Phyllis Irene Gardner was born on July 7, 1950, in Ames, Iowa. Her father, Frank Gardner, taught agronomy at Iowa State University, and her mother, Opal (Van Winkle) Gardner, managed the home.
She received a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1972 and her medical degree from Harvard in 1976. She followed it with residences and fellowships at Columbia, Massachusetts General Hospital and University College London.
She and Mr. Perlman married in 1984. In addition to him, she is survived by their children, Jay and Nicola Perlman; four grandchildren; and two siblings, Donald and Colleen Gardner.
The spectacular downfall of Theranos and Ms. Holmes briefly made Dr. Gardner a celebrity. In addition to being featured on podcasts, she appeared in documentaries and as a character played by Laurie Metcalf in “The Dropout,” a 2022 Hulu mini-series based on the podcast about the case.
Dr. Gardner brushed aside those who tried to explain Ms. Holmes’s behavior as naïveté.
“I think she’s a sociopathic liar and a narcissist,” she said on “Danny in the Valley.” “I don’t give her any leeway. I don’t think she was naïve. I think she was a liar from Day 1.”
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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