Scientific Pub’s Epstein File
It only takes one bad paper to spawn a host of problems
Part 1. Who’s on the list?
Billionaires’ relationships with science can be strange, both in terms of what kinds of science they are interested in and how and why they spend their money to get involved with it. Jeffrey Epstein used money and relationships with people in academia to help science-wash his personal brand and fortune.
The other day Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher were talking about the Epstein List and degrees of guilt by association — if you RSVP’d yes to the party at the island but didn’t know about or participate in what was going on in another villa, should you be publicly shamed?
That got me wondering about how much of Epstein’s money made its way into scientific publishing P&Ls, and who might be on that list.
Kent’s 16 September 2019 article “Sugar Daddies, Science, and Plan S” about the goings on at the MIT Media Lab in the aftermath of Jeffrey Epstein’s death includes crop scientist and small farmer Sarah Taber’s explanation of the OpenAg Initiative there during Epstein and Ito’s tenure.
I won’t bother to distill it for you; in fact, I’m going to call it required reading for where I’m picking up on the story now.
What Kent didn’t know at the time is that four months earlier, a different kind of seedling cultivated in that lab had been planted in the scientific publishing ecosystem, where it took root and continues to thrive.