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nitpicker

(7,153 posts)
Mon Aug 19, 2019, 04:48 AM Aug 2019

Private jets, parties and eugenics: Jeffrey Epstein's bizarre world of scientists

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/18/private-jets-parties-and-eugenics-jeffrey-epsteins-bizarre-world-of-scientists

Private jets, parties and eugenics: Jeffrey Epstein's bizarre world of scientists

The Observer

Luke Darby

Mon 19 Aug 2019 07.00 BST

According to his indictment, over the course of many years Jeffrey Epstein “sexually exploited and abused dozens of minor girls at his homes in Manhattan, New York, and Palm Beach, Florida, among other locations”. It continues: “in order to maintain and increase his supply of victims, Epstein also paid certain of his victims to recruit additional girls to be similarly abused.”
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One aspect of Epstein’s life of luxury seems incongruously out of place though. He surrounded himself with prominent scientists, Harvard professors, multiple Nobel Prize winners, authors, almost exclusively men – Epstein kept his social gatherings stocked with some of the world’s most eminent figures in this world.

He would host dinners at his Upper East side Manhattan apartment and invite a mix of leading scientists and people from the world of fashion and modeling. One scientist, who preferred to remain anonymous, told Slate that there was virtually no interaction between these two sets of guests . “Sometimes he’d turn to his left and ask some science-y questions. Then he’d turn to his right and ask the model to show him her portfolio.” Slate claimed that a young ‘female staffer’ emerged in the middle of one of these dinners to give Epstein a neck massage while he talked.

When he gathered 21 physicists on his private island for a 2006 meeting about gravity, he reportedly had three to four young women in tow at all times. He also met many scientists at an annual gathering hosted by John Brockman, a literary agent who represented famous science authors such as Stephen Hawking and Jared Diamond. Nobel-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who discovered the quark and was represented by Brockman, thanked Epstein for his financial support in the acknowledgments section of his 1995 book, The Quark and the Jaguar.
(snip)

Epstein called himself a “science philanthropist”, and donated handsomely to prestigious organizations such as Harvard, MIT, and the Santa Fe Institute. At one point, he was allegedly giving as much as $20m a year to fund scientists. Some institutions and researchers continued to take Epstein’s money even after his 2008 conviction, like MIT, according to BuzzFeed News.
(snip)

But while Epstein may not have been able to contribute much to the conversations he cultivated around him, he did have sincere interest in at least some scientific topics.

The New York Times did a deep dive into Epstein’s scientific beliefs in an article titled Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race With His DNA. The Times’ reporters found that Epstein was apparently fixated on “transhumanism”, the belief that the human species can be deliberately advanced through technological breakthroughs, such as genetic engineering and artificial intelligence.
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