The head of the renowned Media Lab, based at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US, has stepped down following his and the lab’s connections with the disgraced financier and child-sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein, who died by suicide in a New York City jail in August. Joi Ito, an entrepreneur who has served as director of the MIT Media Lab since 2011, resigned from his position over the weekend following an investigation by The New Yorker. The article charges that he and Peter Cohen, the lab’s former director of development and strategy, had worked to keep Epstein’s contributions to the lab as anonymous despite MIT’s donor database listing Epstein as “disqualified” from providing funds.

Epstein’s actions have reverberated throughout the US scientific community over the past month after investigations revealed that he supported many top research universities and labs by offering their scientists significant financial support. His targets included several prominent physicists and physical scientists including George Church, Lawrence Krauss, Kip Thorne, Frank Wilczek, as well as the late physicists Murray Gell-Mann and Stephen Hawking. Although there is no indication that the scientists were involved in any dubious activity,  Epstein’s connections – apparently intended in part to support his ideas about eugenics and cryogenics – have embarrassed scientists and their institutions.

We recognize with shame and distress that we allowed MIT to contribute to the elevation of [Epstein’s] reputation, which in turn served to distract from his horrifying acts

Rafael Reif

Initial evidence of Epstein’s behaviour first emerged in a Florida court case in 2005 when a 14-year-old girl and her parents reported that Epstein had molested her at his Florida home. The report led to a police investigation and multiple charges that Epstein sexually assaulted underage girls. However, the local district attorney at the time – Alexander Acosta – agreed to a plea of guilty to two counts of soliciting prostitution, one of them involving a girl under the age of 18. Epstein was sentenced to 18 months in jail – during which he was allowed to travel to work in his office six days a week – and placed on a sex offender list.

In November 2018 the Miami Herald then published a full account of 60 women who said that Epstein had abused them. In July this year, he was arrested on sex trafficking charges in New York state. A week later, the situation led to Acosta’s resignation as Secretary of Labor in the Trump administration, owing to his agreement that the sentence was too light. Epstein killed himself in his Manhattan jail cell on 10 August.

‘A mistake of judgement’

While some contributions to research institutions predated Epstein’s original conviction and registration as a sex offender, others continued well after that event, until at least 2017. But once the latest case against him became public, the scientific community began to voice its regrets for their connections. On 22 August MIT president Rafael Reif apologized in a letter to the institute for accepting about $800,000 from Epstein for the Media Lab and individual researchers.

“We recognize with shame and distress that we allowed MIT to contribute to the elevation of his reputation, which in turn served to distract from his horrifying acts,” Reif stated in the letter.  Faculty members’ decisions about accepting financial gifts “are always subject to longstanding Institute processes and principles,” Reif went on. “To my great regret, despite following the processes that have served MIT well for many years, in this instance we made a mistake of judgment.”

The Media Lab’s links to Epstein led to two prominent members – Ethan Zuckerman and Nathan Matias – cutting ties with the lab in late August. But The New Yorker revealed that the connections between the lab and Epstein ran much deeper, reporting that Epstein “appeared to serve as an intermediary between the lab and other wealthy donors…securing at least $7.5m in donations for the lab” from the philanthropist Bill Gates and investor Leon Black. Its report also reveals how lab leaders attempted to put Epstein’s investments as anonymous, despite MIT’s donor database listing Epstein as “disqualified” from providing funds. In an open letter on 7 September announcing that Ito has offered his resignation, Reif says that he has asked MIT’s General Counsel to carry out an independent investigation into the situation. Ito had also previously admitted receiving $1.2m from Epstein for investment funds that he controlled.

‘Moral failings’

Other scientists at MIT have also become embroiled in the scandal, including the MIT physicist Seth Lloyd, who apologized publicly for taking funds from Epstein. In a blog post on 22 August he wrote that he was “deeply disturbed” at Epstein’s original conviction but agreed to visit him during his first prison term. He also received grants from Epstein’s foundation in 2012 and 2015. “These were professional as well as moral failings,” he writes, adding that he has committed financial resources to aid women harmed by Epstein’s abuse.

Yet Epstein’s links with the scientific community extend well beyond MIT. Although Epstein had no background in science, he formed links with high-profile scientists in the early 1990s when he made donations to the Santa Fe Institute, which had been co-founded by Gell-Mann in 1984. In 1998 Epstein also provided research funding for science historian Anne Harrington from Harvard University. “He offered me modest funding to pull together an interdisciplinary group,” she told the Harvard Crimson. “Had I known even a hint of what we all have subsequently learned about him, I never would have accepted it.”

Later, in 2003, Epstein donated $30m to Harvard to fund its programme for evolutionary dynamics, headed by mathematical biologist Martin Nowak. Epstein used his wealth to gather scientists into his orbit beyond Harvard, hosting glittering lunches and dinners and flying them to his private island in the US Virgin Islands. According to the New York Times, he frequently discussed his idea of eugenics in which he planned to inseminate several women to give birth to his offspring.

George Church, who is a chemist and geneticist at Harvard, apologized for his “poor awareness and judgment” in accepting research funds from Epstein in 2007 and meeting him frequently since then, despite admitting to Stat News that he had read articles about Epstein’s conviction in 2008. “But they weren’t clear enough for me to know there was a serious problem,” he claimed. Harvard itself reports that it has received no financial support from Epstein since 2007, although the university says it has no plan to return $6.5m (of the $30m promised) that he had donated before then.

As for Krauss, he received financial support from Epstein for Arizona State University’s Origin Project, which he headed before it closed in 2018. Subject himself to charges of sexual misconduct that led to his departure from Arizona State in May, Krauss had also organized a conference about gravity on Epstein’s island. Other physicists whose names have appeared in the news in connection with Epstein appear merely to have accepted his invitations to conferences and meals.