By Sheeva Azma

Epstein was so fascinated with deception that he aligned with researchers who he could fund to study it. Some of them got caught deceiving people.

This article is one of many focused on the role of science in the Epstein files produced by us. Check out our other Science in the Epstein files articles here or follow our Instagram for more storytelling on the topic.

Tangled webs woven by spiders and Epstein

Here in Oklahoma, it’s tornado season, and one way I know that tornado season can be pretty bad is when the black widows start putting up their webs outside my window. The reason they do this is because all the ants are trying to move into people’s houses since it’s so humid outside. Black widows camp out where they know there will be food – I mean, ants – and stay fed all spring and summer. 

As a kid, I remember seeing black widows (especially in particularly active severe weather periods) and being mesmerized by the red hourglass on its shiny, curvy black body. The red hourglass on the female black widow’s body is supposed to send a “watch out” signal to predators without scaring off their prey, per Duke University. Recently, I saw another female black widow, and was not so mesmerized. It had set up a whole messy web – with eggs brewing up some new baby black widows – just hanging out, ready to hatch.

Because I always see black widows camping out around me (shudder – I do like some spiders, such as the friendly jumping spiders I see in my habitat that are not venomous, but I have never really enjoyed the presence of venomous black widow spiders) during the most active storm seasons, I have now learned to associate them with something disastrous – tornadoes.

Jeffrey Epstein’s presence in the science ecosystem, and his tangled webs, are seemingly disastrous to me, although I have only recently learned of them. Epstein’s involvement in science is a sign of how disastrous the science ecosystem is for women and others marginalized by the scientific enterprise — undoubtedly, in part, due to how little the social structure of science is considered to be part of the research process.

Black widows are venomous and one of the most toxic spiders, and their webs are erratic and disorganized, which actually makes it easier for them to catch prey.

Epstein, similarly, weaved a disorganized, tangled web. He actually wouldn’t fit in super well in the black widow ecosystem, which is dominated by women. Female black widow spiders are significantly larger than males, more territorial, and their venom is stronger than the males, too.

Deception is something Epstein and black widows have in common. Being a predator is another. Black widows can play dead and hide, which is pretty deceptive, since they are dangerous, given that their venom is neurotoxic. Epstein had a facade of being a scholarly individual, but in reality, he was a seasoned criminal in the worst way. It’s deeply unsettling to me, as a woman in science, that someone so deeply involved in trafficking could just put on an intellectual cover to get away with it all.

Epstein was so fascinated with deception that he made it his life’s ethos. In this way, Epstein was the ultimate predator seeking to study deception – I can only assume so he could deceive people and prey on people even more.

Epstein was a huge part of the elite science ecosystem

Proposing deception research studies was a breeze for Eppy, as he was called growing up. He took pride in being a science philanthropist, and he befriended leading scientists, who seemed to interact with him kindly, even talking to him as an intellectual equal despite the fact that Epstein never graduated from college or earned any science degrees – what a huge double standard for these allegedly “scientifically rigorous” people.

Epstein engaged in discussions of science with eminent researchers, frequently naming topics that he not only thought should be studied but stated he would fund. Among the research areas of interest include post-traumatic stress disorder, morality, artificial intelligence, neuroscience topics such as the vagus nerve, genetically edited “designer” babies, and more. 

Epstein was active in the science ecosystem in many ways. He organized conferences on these topics, directly funded research, had an office in one of the programs he funded – Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (PED). He was even a visiting fellow in Harvard’s psychology department from 2005 to 2006.

So many times in the Epstein files, we get lists of research ideas Epstein is excited about. A 2017 email from Epstein highlights topics such as plant biology, communication between plant roots, cutting-edge optogenetics technologies, and whether plants get Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases. He talks about his interest in doing research experiments which could bypass the normal ethical approval process via research institutions’ Institutional Review Board or IRB. He also states he is not interested in sleep research – “I see no theories that can hold their own yet,” he writes about the entire field of sleep research. Like…okay?!

“[Epstein’s research] ideas are half-baked, and do nothing but to make Jeffrey Epstein and his scientist friends feel important,” I stated on Instagram in a March 18 post about Epstein’s collaborations with scientists.

I’ve previously written about scientists implicated in the Epstein files and why we should not take any of them at their word, since they have often lied or misrepresented their associations with Epstein. It turns out that they did not learn as much about deception as much as they fooled around and found out about it. A fair number of Epstein’s science friends have now also either resigned from science or been forced out due to misconduct.

Epstein’s love of deception research

Epstein loved to learn about deception research and called concepts in biology “deceptive” often, like DNA would have some ulterior motive and not just exist as a building block of life. I guess that’s how he thought – or maybe he just thought he was cool spouting these theories and scientists found it intriguing, for whatever reason. 

(It feels so frustrating correcting a man who was way more powerful and rich than me on science. I have two science degrees, while Epstein had zero degrees and hobnobbed with people I could never dream of taking me seriously, including at MIT, where I studied for undergrad.)

Maybe scientists chatted up by Epstein on his deception research ideas thought they could get something out of the endeavor, like money for a research study or being dazzled by wealth and fancy snacks (the latter has long been a mainstay of academic science, at least at seminar talks and departmental events — thank you, taxpayers!) on a nice little visit to an Epstein property. Maybe the scientists also wanted to trick people and get more rich and successful and be able to live above the law as Epstein did. Who can really say, especially since it feels like nobody is asking these scientists, and why would they at all feel obligated to tell the truth about their Epstein ties at this point, anyway?

The word “deception” has 1,684 results in the Epstein files. That’s far too much to cover here, given that I only have 30 minutes left to write this blog, so let me just talk about a few salient points and ironies.

An Epstein island conference on deception was in the works

Jeffrey Epstein was so rapt by the topic of deception that, in 2014, he mobilized his favorite scientists who did research on or related to this topic for a potential conference on his private island, per this Epstein files email. 

“Understanding deception to understand the brain” reads a one-liner description of Epstein’s research interests. I can just imagine Epstein running his own deception lab, asking his half-baked questions and getting taken seriously every time. It’s so maddening as someone who asked good questions in science and rarely got taken seriously, or who had to constantly voice her opinion in multiple ways to be heard.

Back to this deception conference. Epstein’s scientist friends listed their one liners for the proposed conference, which the email states was tentatively scheduled for Feb 22-23, 2014. Ed Boyden, Judith Donath, Neil Gershenfeld, and Sebastian Seung are listed in the email, presumably as potential participants, each with a summary of their research. Of the one-liners, only Donath’s and Seung’s explicitly mention deception. 

Donath’s one-liner, which is way more than one line, states: “Signaling theory is the framework for understanding how our various signals evolved and what keeps them honest enough to function. And deception is central, particularly the question of how much deception is tolerable, even desirable, in various circumstances.

Seung’s one-liner speaks of “Modeling intertemporal choice as a game between multiple selves, and its relation to self-deception.”

Boyden and Gershenfeld have larger, pie-in-the-sky type of blurbs for this event. Boyden’s is to “Build tools that reveal how the brain computes, to enable curing of brain disorders and understanding of the human condition.” Gershenfeld’s is “Brain-building as a test case for aligning the representations of hardware and software.”

The truth is that deception is an important concept in biology because it relates directly to organisms’ survival. Many animals use camouflage, a form of deception, to stay alive and evade predators. 

It seems to me that these deception researchers were also trying to “stay alive” in science’s publish-or-perish world, but not in a way that upholds the values that we expect from taxpayer-funded science (which all of these researchers benefitted from in their grants, as well as government collaborations, in the cases of Boyden and Gershenfeld, with DARPA and the National Science Foundation – two government agencies focused on science research).

What’s so ironic and telling about many of these deception researchers – including Epstein, we can say – is how much deception they themselves did! Maybe it was a survival mechanism for these researchers, just as camouflage is for Arctic foxes or grasshoppers. Whatever the reason, though, it was wrong.

These deception researchers (and more) ended up getting tangled in their own webs and now they’re also, very publicly, in the Epstein web, with their careers ripe to be ripped away from them after so many productive years living above the law and under the radar about it all.

These recent findings would be poetic justice if these men did not have the privilege of having a whole career in science. However, now they are just ridiculous ironies that make reasonably good stories to tell the next time you don’t know what to say at a party (if we are even having those anymore post-COVID). If you’re interested in some of the actual deception research talked about in the Epstein files, check out this reel I made.

An Epstein-linked scientist lied about his association with the convicted trafficker — and got away with it

Ed Boyden, mentioned above as invited to the island deception conference, has misrepresented his ties with Epstein. I’ve written about that here and here by now. He said he only talked to Epstein about academic topics, and that this interaction was minimal. However, he’s mentioned in the Epstein files 969 times, is documented as receiving expensed airfare to visit the Zorro Ranch (currently under investigation by the state of New Mexico), and is seen in the Epstein files coming up with new research directions studying the cognitive behavior of plants and chitchatting with Epstein about how he wants to learn more math to be able to do more cool science. He’s still a professor at MIT, though perhaps not for long. The person he visited the Epstein ranch with, Martin Nowak, is now on paid leave at Harvard and recently resigned from the Austrian Academy of Sciences. How much longer can Boyden live his science double life, I wonder?

Another Epstein-linked deception and morality researcher faked data and got found out

One Epstein friend’s name who is missing from the abovementioned deception research conference is Marc Hauser, a now-disgraced scientist who has published on deception, but left Harvard in 2011 due to scientific misconduct. “I am willing to fund an exploratory meeting here in Florida. Gather your best thinkers for a weekend,” writes Epstein to Hauser in 2009 for an unspecific science topic. “No more than you plus 3, to thrash out the idea, and examine the competition. Fair?”

Epstein and Hauser also talked shop about morality research projects Hauser could pursue with Epstein’s financial help. In late 2010, under investigation by Harvard for scientific misconduct, Hauser withdrew from an Epstein-funded morality conference, per the Epstein files. “It’s going to get worse,” Epstein is documented as telling Hauser in the same email chain. 

“It is absolutely awful, emotionally and financially,” Hauser tells Epstein just a month earlier, in August 2010, of the investigation which revealed him liable for eight counts of scientific misconduct. Hauser looked to Epstein for advice, as well.

Hilariously, in retrospect, we see Hauser’s papers sent around in an email chain of must-read papers on deception. So much for studying deception if you can’t even apply what you find in your own research properly to do it well…LOL. It would be a delightful fall from grace to witness if I hadn’t idolized Hauser as an MIT undergrad, and even applied to work in his lab around that same time (I obviously did not get the job…he was clearly busy with way more nefarious things).

What I learned studying deception research in the Epstein files

Epstein spent his early career getting rich, and the latter part of his career investing in scientists, emailing researchers about plants’ ability to think, while committing some of the most heinous crimes possible. Science was a cover for Epstein – a way to have a good reputation despite all of the ills he committed. It was not okay, and it is still not okay, now that we all know. He, and the people with whom he affiliated, did not get what it means to do science – or maybe they simply did not care.

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