By Sheeva Azma
Jeffrey Epstein, the Gates Foundation, and the Templeton Foundation collectively funded the same handful of papers coming out of Harvard University.
As the saying goes, “You get what you pay for.” That is abundantly clear when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein’s financial support of scientists. Here are papers that publicly declare support from Jeffrey Epstein in their acknowledgement sections. “Support” in science almost always means “funding”.
Epstein’s personal interests in power and prestige seem obvious to me as I skimmed the topics of these papers — how to come out on top evolutionarily, how people get more powerful socially, and how 2008 election dynamics worked all are represented here.
Please note: this is not meant to be a comprehensive list of papers funded by Epstein and will not be updated.
Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics papers with Epstein (and friends) acknowledgements
Epstein was acknowledged in the following papers authored or co-authored by the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, a research organization at Harvard that Epstein helped establish by providing initial funding. He also had an office at this research institute, which was located in Harvard Square. The PED closed in 2021 after its Epstein connections were discovered. Epstein had frequent meetings at the PED, especially after he was banned from visiting MIT towards the end of his life since staff found his entourage “creepy” and “awful” according to the MIT report on Epstein ties. The Epstein files contains many itineraries showing that different scientists would drop by the PED to meet with Epstein.
I have previously blogged about Martin Nowak, director of the now-defunct PED, and his various involvements with Epstein. He is currently on paid leave from his professorship at Harvard, being investigated for the second time for his Epstein ties, according to the Harvard Crimson.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and specifically Grand Challenge grant #37874, is also mentioned as a funding source of each of these papers. The Gates Foundation conducted an internal review in which, it says, no evidence was found that Gates donated to Epstein. However, they certainly donated to those affiliated with the PED together, going by the numerous papers in this list thanking both of them.
Only two papers on this list, Corina Tarnita’s thesis and the Harvard, but not Harvard PED paper in the next section, were not funded by the Gates Grand Challenge grant #37874. That doesn’t mean that Epstein didn’t fund other papers not funded by Gates, but that is a puzzling coincidence given the Gates foundation’s statement. Are they saying that Gates never wrote checks directly to Epstein, meaning that coordinating donations would not be off the table?
What an unsatisfying report from the Gates Foundation on its Epstein ties. I previously analyzed staff at the Gates Foundation’s links to Epstein in this shortform video on Instagram.
It would not seem far-fetched to me. Epstein talks about coordinating donations to the MIT Media Lab from Leon Black, Epstein’s former client, in the Epstein files (EFTA02631916). There’s also a note from Martin Nowak, head of the Harvard PED, on receiving $4 million from Leon Black, in the files (EFTA02343503). Guess who Nowak is thanking? His friend Jeffrey Epstein.
If there are no financial links between Epstein and billionaire donors like Leon Black and Bill Gates, explain this email chain (EFTA02680328) in which Leon Black’s financial person and Epstein’s financial person (oddly both named Richard) appear to be having some sort of conversation about wire transfers. There are also two anonymous, $5 million and $2 million donations from Leon Black and Bill Gates, respectively, to the MIT Media Lab in the Epstein heyday — the MIT report on its Epstein ties stated that these donations were not laundered by Epstein. Couldn’t they just have been suggested by Epstein, and wouldn’t that have been bad enough? I wish I had more time to dig into it all. The people in the Epstein files are clearly in denial of some things.
Let’s not let the Templeton Foundation off the hook here, since they’re also listed in these papers. Epstein was particularly close with Barnaby Marsh, an executive there who introduced scientists to Epstein, according to CBS News.
“But Sheeva,” you may argue, “these scientists are at the top of their field. Of course they have so much funding.” Well, explain to me, then, why they all have funding from Epstein, the Templeton Foundation, and the Gates Foundation. I am willing to accept that a single researcher — likely director Martin Nowak, if I had to guess — may have those funding sources, but the way they all three appear in all of these papers feels very suspicious indeed. Quite frankly, it feels to me like the Gates Foundation is lying to us all.
Our taxpayer dollars — from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and even a fellowship from the Department of Defense that I noticed (called the NDSEG) — also funded this work that Epstein liked so much he threw his own literal money at it. Yuck to the power of yuck.
A comprehensive, but incomplete, list of science papers authored by the Harvard PED from 2003-2010 can be found in the Epstein files as EFTA02443859.
January 29, 2009: Modeling in-group favoritism in the 2008 presidential race
The paper’s full citation:
Rand, D. G., Pfeiffer, T., Dreber, A., Sheketoff, R. W., Wernerfelt, N. C., & Benkler, Y. (2009). Dynamic remodeling of in-group bias during the 2008 presidential election. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 106(15), 6187–6191. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0811552106 [PubMed]
The paper’s acknowledgements:
We thank Karen Croxson, Karen Norberg, Elizabeth Paci, James Paci, and Fernando Racimo for assisting with data collection and Max Bazerman, James Fowler, Lowell Gaertner, Martin Nowak, and Toshio Yamagishi for helpful comments and feedback. This work was supported by the Kauffman Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, the National Science Foundation/National Institutes of Health joint program in mathematical biology and National Institutes of Health Grant R01GM078986, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Grand Challenges Grant 37874), J. Epstein, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (D.G.R.), the Society in Science/The Branco Weiss Fellowship (T.P.), and the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation (A.D.).
April 24, 2009: Evolutionary fitness
This paper is included in the published Ph.D. dissertation of Chaitanya Sanjay Gokhale, the paper’s lead author.
The paper’s full citation:
Gokhale, C. S., Iwasa, Y., Nowak, M. A., & Traulsen, A. (2009). The pace of evolution across fitness valleys. Journal of theoretical biology, 259(3), 613–620. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2009.04.011 [PubMed] [ScienceDirect]
The paper’s acknowledgements:
We thank Andrew Murray for initiating this project. C.S.G. and A.T. are grateful for financial support from the Emmy-Noether program of the DFG. M.A.N. is supported by the John Templeton Foundation, the NSF/NIH joint program in mathematical biology (NIH Grant R01GM078986), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Grand Challenges Grant 37874), and J. Epstein.
May 26, 2009: Cooperation among selfish people
The paper’s full citation:
Antal, T., Ohtsuki, H., Wakeley, J., Taylor, P. D., & Nowak, M. A. (2009). Evolution of cooperation by phenotypic similarity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 106(21), 8597–8600. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0902528106 [PubMed] [Free full text link]
The paper’s acknowledgements:
This work is supported by The John Templeton Foundation, the National Science Foundation (NSF)/National Institutes of Health (NIH) (R01GM078986) joint program in mathematical biology, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Grand Challenges Grant 37874), NIH Grants CA 57345, CA 135877, and CA 62924, NSF Grant DBI 0845275, National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship 32 CFR 168a, and J. Epstein.
June 2009: How natural selection chooses from different strategies
The dissertation’s full citation:
Tarnita, C. E. (2009). Evolutionary dynamics in structured populations. Thesis (Ph.D., Dept. of Mathematics)–Harvard University, 2009. [Harvard] [Full text in the Epstein files]
Excerpt from the dissertation’s acknowledgements (starts on page 7 of the PDF in the Epstein files):
I am thankful to Jeffrey Epstein for making PED possible and for allowing me to participate in his tireless pursuit of knowledge.
June 21, 2009: Evolutionary game theory of genetic mutations
The paper’s full citation:
Antal, T., Traulsen, A., Ohtsuki, H., Tarnita, C. E., & Nowak, M. A. (2009). Mutation-selection equilibrium in games with multiple strategies. Journal of theoretical biology, 258(4), 614–622. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2009.02.010 [PubMed] [ScienceDirect]
The paper’s acknowledgements:
We are grateful for support from the John Templeton Foundation, the NSF/NIH (R01GM078986) joint program in mathematical biology, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Grand Challenges Grant 37874), the Emmy-Noether program of the DFG, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and J. Epstein.
August 19, 2009: Origins of life
The paper’s full citation:
Ohtsuki, H., & Nowak, M. A. (2009). Prelife catalysts and replicators. Proceedings. Biological sciences, 276(1674), 3783–3790. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2009.1136 [PubMed] [Free full text link]
The paper’s acknowledgements:
Support from the John Templeton Foundation, the NSF/NIH joint program in mathematical biology (NIH grant no. R01GM078986), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Grand Challenges grant 37874), and J. Epstein is gratefully acknowledged.
September 8, 2009: How currency value affects sharing in 3- to 6-year-olds
The paper’s full citation:
Blake, P.R., Rand, D.G. Currency value moderates equity preference among young children. Evolution and Human Behavior, 31(3): 210-218. [APA PsycNet] [Full text at University of Pennsylvania]
The paper’s acknowledgements:
We thank Elizabeth Paci for helpful suggestions during study planning; Paul Harris, Anna Dreber, and Johan Almenberg for comments on earlier drafts; and the Discovery Center at the Museum of Science, Boston, for providing a research site for these experiments. Peter Blake thanks the Spencer Foundation and Harvard’s Mind, Brain and Behavior program for grants supporting this research. David Rand gratefully acknowledges support from the John Templeton Foundation, the NSF/NIH joint program in mathematical biology (NIH grant R01GM078986), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Grand Challenges grant 37874), and J. Epstein.
August 26, 2010: Evolutionary altruism paper with E.O. Wilson in Nature
The paper’s full citation:
Nowak, M. A., Tarnita, C. E., & Wilson, E. O. (2010). The evolution of eusociality. Nature, 466(7310), 1057–1062. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09205 [PubMed] [Free full text link]
The paper’s acknowledgements:
We thank K. M. Horton for advice and help in preparing the manuscript. M.A.N. and C.E.T. gratefully acknowledge support from the John Templeton Foundation, the NSF/NIH joint program in mathematical biology (NIH grant R01GM078986), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Grand Challenges grant 37874), and J. Epstein. [PubMed] [Free full text link]
May 17, 2010: Evolution of trust as studied using game theory
The dissertation’s full citation:
Manapat, M. (2010). Critical phenomena in evolutionary dynamics [PhD dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology]. MIT Open Scholarship. http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582 [Full text at MIT]
One of the dissertation’s acknowledgements (the document appears to have many published papers put together):
We thank Max Bazerman, Deepak Malhotra, and Daniel Rosenbloom for comments. Support from the the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Grand Challenges grant 37874), the Harvard University Mind, Brain, and Behavior Program, the NSF/NIH joint program in mathematical biology (NIH grant R01GM078986), the John Templeton Foundation, andJ. Epstein is gratefully acknowledged.
September 27, 2010: Mathematical modeling of tumor biology
The paper’s full citation:
Bozic, I., Antal, T., Ohtsuki, H., Carter, H., Kim, D., Chen, S., Karchin, R., Kinzler, K. W., Vogelstein, B., & Nowak, M. A. (2010). Accumulation of driver and passenger mutations during tumor progression. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 107(43), 18545–18550. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1010978107 [PubMed] [Free full text link]
The paper’s acknowledgements:
This work is supported by The John Templeton Foundation, the National Science Foundation (NSF)/National Institutes of Health (NIH) (R01GM078986) joint program in mathematical biology, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Grand Challenges Grant 37874), NIH Grants CA 57345, CA 135877, and CA 62924, NSF Grant DBI 0845275, National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship 32 CFR 168a, and J. Epstein.
July 28, 2010: Modeling social aspects of vaccination behavior
The paper’s full citation:
Fu, F., Rosenbloom, D. I., Wang, L., & Nowak, M. A. (2011). Imitation dynamics of vaccination behaviour on social networks. Proceedings. Biological sciences, 278(1702), 42–49. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2010.1107 [PubMed] [Free full text link]
The paper’s acknowledgements:
We thank two anonymous referees for their constructive and insightful comments. We thank Alison Hill for helpful advice about the Gillespie algorithm for simulating epidemiological processes on graphs. We are grateful for support from the John Templeton Foundation, the National Science Foundation/National Institute of Health joint programme in mathematical biology (NIH grant no. R01GM078986), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Grand Challenges grant 37874), an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, China Scholarship Council, NSFC (grant nos. 10972002, 60736022 and 60674050) and J. Epstein.
October 28, 2010: Pancreatic cancer genetic evolution (in Nature)
The paper’s full citation:
Yachida, S., Jones, S., Bozic, I., Antal, T., Leary, R., Fu, B., Kamiyama, M., Hruban, R. H., Eshleman, J. R., Nowak, M. A., Velculescu, V. E., Kinzler, K. W., Vogelstein, B., & Iacobuzio-Donahue, C. A. (2010). Distant metastasis occurs late during the genetic evolution of pancreatic cancer. Nature, 467(7319), 1114–1117. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09515 [PubMed] [Free full text]
The paper’s acknowledgements:
This work was supported by National Institutes of Health grants CA106610 (C.A.I.-D.), CA62924 (C.A.I.-D., M.A.N.), CA43460 (B.V.), CA57345 (K.W.K. and V.E.V.), CA121113 (V.E.V. and K.W.K.), GM078986 (M.A.N.), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Grand Challenges Grant 37874, the Uehara Memorial Foundation (S.Y.), the AACR-Barletta Foundation (C.A.I.-D.), the John Templeton Foundation, Pilot Funding from the Sol Goldman Pancreatic Cancer Research Center, the Michael Rolfe Pancreatic Cancer Foundation, the George Rubis Endowment for Pancreatic Cancer Research, the Joseph C. Monastra Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research, the Alfredo Scatena Memorial Fund, the Virginia and the D.K. Ludwig Fund for Cancer Research, The Joint Program in Mathematical Biology and J. Epstein. We would like to acknowledge T. C. Cornish, C. Henderson, N. Omura and S.-M. Hong for their technical assistance in selected aspects of this work.
January 21, 2011: Social evolutionary game theory
The paper’s full citation:
Tarnita, C. E., Wage, N., & Nowak, M. A. (2011). Multiple strategies in structured populations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108(6), 2334–2337. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1016008108 [PubMed] [Free full text link]
The paper’s acknowledgements:
C.E.T. and M.A.N. gratefully acknowledge support from the John Templeton Foundation, the National Science Foundation/National Institutes of Health joint program in mathematical biology (National Institutes of Health Grant R01GM078986), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Grand Challenges Grant 37874), and J. Epstein.
May 5, 2011: Reputation-based social partner switching
The paper’s full citation:
Du, F. & Fu, F. (2011). Partner Selection Shapes the Strategic and Topological Evolution of Cooperation. Dyn Games Appl, 1, 354-369. [Free full text link]
The paper’s acknowledgements:
We are indebted to the editor and anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions, which helped improve this work. We thank Martin A. Nowak, Christoph Hauert and Nicholas A. Christakis for stimulating discussions. This work was supported by the John Templeton Foundation, the National Science Foundation/National Institute of Health joint program in mathematical biology (NIH grant No. R01GM078986), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Grand Challenges grant 37874), NSFC (grant Nos. 10972002, 60736022 and 60674050), and J. Epstein.
August 16, 2011: Studying ‘antisocial punishment,’ evidently the opposite of altruism, in Nature Communications
The paper’s full citation:
Rand, D. G., & Nowak, M. A. (2011). The evolution of antisocial punishment in optional public goods games. Nature communications, 2, 434. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms1442 [PubMed] [Free full text link]
The paper’s acknowledgements:
We thank Anna Dreber, Simon Gachter, Christoph Hauert, Benedikt Herrmann, Karl Sigmund, and Arne Traulsen for helpful comments and suggestions; Martijn Egas, Benedikt Herrmann, and Simon Gachter for sharing their experimental data; and Nicos Nikiforakis for the use of his publicly available data. Support from the John Templeton Foundation, the NSF/NIH joint program in mathematical biology (NIH grant R01GM078986), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Grand Challenges grant 37874), and J. Epstein is gratefully acknowledged.
February 7, 2012: Computational analysis of genetic diversity
The paper’s full citation:
Derr, J., Manapat, M. L., Rajamani, S., Leu, K., Xulvi-Brunet, R., Joseph, I., Nowak, M. A., & Chen, I. A. (2012). Prebiotically plausible mechanisms increase compositional diversity of nucleic acid sequences. Nucleic acids research, 40(10), 4711–4722. https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gks065 [PubMed] [Free full text link]
The paper’s acknowledgements:
Human Frontiers Science Program (postdoctoral fellowships to J.D. and R.X.); Harvard University (I.A.C., Bauer Fellow); NIH grant GM068763 to the Center for Modular Biology at Harvard; NSF/NIH Joint Program in Mathematical Biology (NIH grant R01GM078986 to M.A.N.); John Templeton Foundation (M.A.N.); Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Grand Challenges grant 37874 to M.A.N.) and J. Epstein (M.A.N.). Funding for open access charge: NIH (grant GM068763).
June 21, 2012: A paper simply called Evolution of in-group favoritism
The paper’s full citation:
Fu, F., Tarnita, C. E., Christakis, N. A., Wang, L., Rand, D. G., & Nowak, M. A. (2012). Evolution of in-group favoritism. Scientific reports, 2, 460. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep00460 [PubMed] [Free full text link]
The paper’s acknowledgements:
We are grateful for support from the Harvard Milton fund, the Harvard Society of Fellows, the John Templeton Foundation, the National Science Foundation/National Institute of Health joint program in mathematical biology (NIH grant no. R01GM078986), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Grand Challenges grant 37874), NSFC (grant nos. 10972002, 60736022 and 61020106005), the National Institute on Aging (P-01 AG031093 and P30 AG034420) and the National Science Foundation (SES-0719404) and J. Epstein.
Other papers funded by Epstein
March 24, 2010: A paper showing that damage to a specific brain area affects moral judgments
I previously blogged about this paper in the larger context of “evil neuroscience” in Epstein-land here.
This paper looking at people with lesions to a brain area called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex concluded that the patients had altered moral judgement: specifically, in one part of the study, these patients viewed serious crimes as being less so. This study was conducted on a very small group of patients and should be viewed as a preliminary study that requires more evidence. However, in my review of research in this field more recently, work continues, from many of these same authors, that have seemingly replicated and expanded on these findings.
The conclusions of this Epstein-funded study are startling given Epstein’s acknowledged funding of it. This line of work ties directly into Jeffrey Epstein’s ethos because he often downplayed his own crimes, such as in this excerpt from a longer interview conducted by Steve Bannon in the Epstein files. In this interview, Epstein describes himself as a “tier one” sexual predator, when he was in fact a tier three predator in the state of New York due to his conviction and jail time in Florida from 2008-2009. In that interview, he also stated that his money was not “dirty money” and that his social impact, such as by supporting vaccination initiatives in developing countries, outweighs where his money came from – by totally legal ways, he mentioned, in the aforementioned Bannon interview.
According to the acknowledgement section of this paper, Marc Hauser’s research contribution was funded by Jeffrey Epstein. Hauser left Harvard upon an investigation finding him liable of 8 counts of scientific misconduct. This paper was also funded by the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, as well as someone credited as S. Shuman (also to Hauser).
The paper’s full citation:
Young, L., Bechara, A., Tranel, D., Damasio, H., Hauser, M., & Damasio, A. (2010). Damage to ventromedial prefrontal cortex impairs judgment of harmful intent. Neuron, 65(6), 845–851. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2010.03.003 [PubMed] [Free full text]
The paper’s acknowledgement section:
We thank Rebecca Saxe and Josh Greene for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. This research was supported in part by a grant from the NSF-HSD (A.B., A.D., M.H.), NINDS (P01 NS19632) (A.D., H.D., D.T.), gift funds from J. Epstein and S. Shuman (M.H.), by NIDA (DA022549) (D.T.), and the NSF (L.Y.).
There’s so much science in the Epstein files
Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement with elite science is a big “yikes” for science culture.
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