This article is awful and does a terrible job explaining the facts, and specifically blurs the timeline in a way that paints a different picture than the facts.
1. Jeffrey Epstein gives 9 million dollars to Harvard researchers. 6.5 was for PED, with an additional 23.5 from his foundation. This funds PED's creation
2. Jeffrey Epstein gave $200,000 to Department Chair of Psychology, he applied to be a Visiting Fellow. The Chair supported his application, and Epstein was granted Visiting Fellow status for the 2005-2006 academic year.
3. Jeffrey Epstein was arrested, so he withdrew his application for being a Visiting Fellow for the 2006-2007 academic year.
4. Epstein tries to donate to Harvard again, and Harvard denies him due to his arrest record. He makes no more donations to Harvard despite several professors lobbying administration. He does however introduce several professors to rich philanthropists who do make donations.
5. Epstein maintained a relationship with Martin Novak (director of the PED, which Epstein funded), who let Epstein on campus 40 times between 2010 and 2018. There is no evidence he engaged with any undergrad students. He used these visits to speak with prominent faculty.
Agree. People's response to all this is so strange. It seems clear to me that this guy was legitimately interested in supporting science, and was a sexual predator. For some reason people really can't handle the idea of him being both things simultaneously. The world is actually just complicated sometimes.
There is a long history of great scientific advancements being made by otherwise unsavory people. Werner Von Braun, Ronald Fisher, Francis Galton, just off the top of my head. By all accounts these people legitimately loved science and reason and also held otherwise abhorrent views, and in some cases took abhorrent actions. This is just an ambiguity we have to live with.
In 2007, with the support of luminaries like Steven Pinker and Alan Dershowitz, Epstein managed to finagle from Alex Acosta a non-prosecution agreement for human trafficking that ultimately resulted in a country club sentence that allowed him, during his short custodial sentence, to work from his own private office for 12 hours every day.
The problem people have with Epstein's "support for science" is that he spent his life collecting influential people, and, in at least once notorious instance but likely many others, deploying the influence of those people to his ends, which included the trafficking of minors for rape. One reasonably asks, "was Epstein actually trying to fund science at Harvard? Or was brokering donations for programs he could brag about having a hand in getting off the ground just an easy way to create social bonds with the world's most influential people?" One then looks at what Pinker did for Epstein in 2007 and, probably, quickly finds the answer to that question.
This was also the problem with the MIT Media Lab's policy of denying named donations for Epstein while allowing him to broker donations behind the scenes. They were getting money from powerful people, because of Epstein's work. But MIT and the Media Lab's management missed what Epstein was getting out of the deal.
It doesn't seem clear to me at all that this guy was JUST interested in supporting science.
Epstein's intrest in eugenics is pretty well documented. I don't think it's a stretch to think his special interest in funding an evolution research team at Harvard was directly related to his abhorrent views. Sure his funding probably has had some higher order positive effects but it seems incredibly silly to suggest that such a monsterous person was donating all this money becuase of his passion for science. His constant oversight suggests that he probably had an agenda and use in mind for the research and I find it incredibly hard to believe it was anything good/humanitarian. You also have to keep in mind this is not just a guy with bad views, this is a person who has wielded money and power to directly cause evil for a very long time.
Sure, this article and "people's response" are indeed a reaction to terrible people driving science without any, uh, mediation.
The development of science from the situation of renaissance proto-scientists requiring noble patrons to NSF grants being evaluated based on ostensibly objective criteria was a progressive development.
The rise of direct grants by the very wealthy - for whatever they believe science should be - is a regressive development. It's a development that likely won't destroy science but one which has the potential distort it by moving results in the directions these very wealthy patrons desire.
> It seems clear to me that this guy was legitimately interested in supporting science, and was a sexual predator.
That’s not clear at all. In fact it’s a quite reasonable interpretation to think all his involvement in academics was a way to impart credibility to himself, credibility which was then exploited to forge relationships with powerful people who helped him get away with raping minors.
This is very true, in politics specially things are not black or white, and in this case, common sense will just label him as a bad guy, despite the fact that he may have positive impact in science contributions. One specific situation that raises questions was his donation to Long Beach PD, for protection, while they also turn one eye blind for his behavior
Many invest in education to get influence and nudge research in a certain direction.
Love for science is one thing, love for influence is another. Science at least demands to be critical here and taking a look at which fields he invested is certainly a worthwhile endeavor. For science.
> individuals can pick and choose lines of inquiry
It is not scientific to think that would not influence results. Of course his DNA might have been just a selfless offering for scientific inquiry and maybe the pope was right all along.
Science can nurture naïveté to encourage impartiality. But sometimes you need to know when to drop it.
People try to classify everything around them in binary. As its easy to just label people.
But the fact they fail to understand is that no one is just "good" or "bad". You have to evaluate each of the actions and weigh it. This is tough and most don't do it.
No one is black or white, they are just shades of grey.
I agree that people are many things and that monsters can also do good things. People are complex. But...
> This is just an ambiguity we have to live with.
This just isn't true. I'm quite sure that Epstein supported what he thought was good science. I'm also quite sure that Epstein had opinions about why his treatment of girls was justified. We do not have to accept that people who have violated our basic ideas about humanity should be allowed to do science. The most obvious example is the controversy around what to do with the results of the Nazi / Unit 731 human torture / experiments[1]. Both the idea that Epstein should be allowed to fund research and the idea that he should not are ethical positions. We should not pretend we don't have a choice.
The core accusation is not that he was a sexual predator, it is that he was using minors to trap and control people, for as yet an unidentified beneficiary.
I was disappointed with the article for a different reason. It starts out by saying it's not just about Jeffrey Epstein, but then it's mostly about Jeffrey Epstein.
I mean, Jeffrey Epstein is a problem of course, and his example helps to illustrate the problem, but the core of the issue is that things cost money, so the people with money call the shots. This can undermine the honesty and independence and objectivity of science, of journalism, of politics, of democracy, or any other aspect of life.
Money is power, and that makes a very unequal distribution of money a problem. To science, but also to many other aspects of our society.
#5 neglects the fact that Epstein had an office on campus, which is far more interesting than the number of times he was invited in by staff. (Covered in more detail by someone else, below.)
My reading is that Epstein had an office when he was a student, before being conviction, but not after. After conviction he visited others in their offices.
One was an extensive report done by Harvard that was based on first hand interviews of the people involved. This post is some guy on the internet who claims to have done no original research who has an opinion from reading 2nd and 3rd hand sources. (which were probably based on the harvard report)
Article's details don't truly deliver on headline.
Epstein funded his pet research areas, yes. But all sources of funding including government grants do the same, one way or another. And across all rich funders, the variety of interests is very large, and include areas other more institutional funding bureaucracies ignore.
Also, despite Epstein's (somewhat still-underexplained) wealth & largesse, his money was a drop in the bucket. When the article points out that "more than two thirds of Epstein's donations—$6.5 million—went to PED director Martin Nowak" – an already well-funded researcher, it actually undermines its case. Epstein gave less than $10 million total? And to established programs? How does a tiny bit of funding, from an extreme-outlier bete-noire, to some not-even-fringe programs, make any negative general case against private funding?
That such private funding picks a different mix of researchers than the Harvard Professor writing this article would pick is the point - don't send all funding through the exact same credentialed-panels of established academia. Accept some curve-ball initiatives from other uncorrelated piles-of-resources.
The article's one tangible example of some favors flowing from a Harvard academic to Epstein's defense – Epstein's lawyer Dershowitz getting some linguistic advice from Steven Pinker – doesn't involve research funding at all. Someone's high-end legal counsel is being paid specifically to marshal resources & expertise for their defense. There's no distorting quid-pro-quo with regard to other payments: it's a totally up-front fee-for-advocacy relationship. (And that's even before considering Dershowitz's other alleged entanglements in Epstein matters.)
Your argument is logically sound but provably false. Humans are known to compromise their ethics for relatively small amounts of money. For example, Martha Stewart was a billionaire when she engaged in insider trading and then lied about it to the FBI, resulting in her going to federal prison--all to avoid a measly $45,000 loss!
The article makes clear that Epstein was granted physical access to facilities, the title of "visiting fellow at Harvard" in areas of study in which he had no credentials, and getting world-renowned researchers to validate his crackpot theories of racial eugenics due to his wealth.
I mean, you are being reasonable: $10 million in funding is peanuts to Harvard, which has an endowment of almost US $41 billion. But apparently Harvard is willing to lease our their credibility for such "a tiny bit" of money.
I'd agree the building-access, especially when Epstein was a post-release sex-offender (and when most observers should have already suspected he'd gotten off easy), is most-concerning.
But unless he was sneaking in after-hours to change experiments' results, it doesn't imply any research was distorted. Even something like "key card access" may have been entirely ceremonial in practice, if his actual visits were just scheduled meetings with real staff members.
In fact, as an example of the kind of 'aura-of-respectability' he was purchasing, it's an example of how the research may have been left uninfluenced – because other trinkets-of-association were delivered. If he got some really, really expensive equivalents of 'Harvard Sweatshirts' for his money, it's less likely he'd be changing lines-of-inquiry in research programs.
I don't find the 'visiting fellow' thing very significant. Harvard & others seem fairly generous with such empty titles, a bit like honorary degrees, that cost them no money but get some funding or reflected-glory back on them. (And, it's not clear if this particular credentialist tchotchke was pre- or post- Epstein's first conviction.)
You are of course correct that it's sometimes surprising the tiny amounts of money people commit ethical infractions to chase. But there's no evidence, or anecdotes, in this article that rich-person money is more corrupting in research matters than that from large institutions, including foundations & the government. The favor-trading, citation-log-rolling, buttering-up, ego-stroking, clique-protecting and everything else academia is known for seems just as bad, or worse, among those competing for traditional "panel-allocated" resources as among those receiving rich-person grants.
>getting world-renowned researchers to validate his crackpot theories of racial eugenics due to his wealth.
Do you have more information on this? Is there evidence that funding recipients Martin Nowak and George Church actually had their area of study directed by Epstein, or that the science was fundamentally flawed.
On a conceptual level, there is no reason that evil people cant use dirty money to fund good academics researchers that they happen to find interesting.
> For example, Martha Stewart was a billionaire when she engaged in insider trading and then lied about it to the FBI
I can't say I know anyone who would be __ethically__ opposed to insider trading. From a regulatory view point most people would be against it, but I don't think anyone views it as a ethical issue.
For those unfamiliar with academic research budgets, my lab's NIH budget was recently renewed and totaled to 2 million. So in the same ballpark as this.
2 million is not that much. When you add up research assistantship labor costs, scientific equipment and consumable reagents/materials, it depletes faster than you'd like. And our lab is quite small (~5 students); large ivy league research labs often have a couple dozen people.
Epstein funded his pet research areas, yes. But all sources of funding including government grants do the same, one way or another
Some grant-making-organization and state and private foundations now may have degenerated to the point that they are nothing but schemes for financing someone's pet ideas. But I will claim that at their best, they are better than that.
It seems like it's fashionable to dump on bureaucracies making decisions based on ostensibly objective criteria and assume that their decisions are no better than the pet of ideas of utterly vile people. But I'll stand against fashion and claim that isn't true.
Sure, okay, agreed that 6 million is not much on a global scale. But you can't be serious if you think 6 million in the hands of one person can't be used for some serious damage. You won't be able to buy a country but you could, i dont know, buy a really nice lab, and then use it to research eugenics or something.
Not a big fan of these 'drop in the bucket' arguments. A breakthrough scientific idea can cost anywhere between 0 dollars and a billion dollars. We don't want that breakthrough to be in the field of eugenics.
Of course $6 million can do a lot of damage in the wrong hands. But here, it was already in the wrong hands.
Was there actual damage done by transferring it to a legitimate research group, doing real research, that had to pass many levels of review (whatever its funding)? If not given to a Harvard research lab, might that $6 million not have done even worse damage elsewhere?
Maybe someone can word this statement in a way that actually describes the problem better for someone not as well-versed in the ins-and-outs of funding in academia?
The Epstein affair brings to light a much larger problem: it undermines the integrity of the research enterprise when individuals can pick and choose lines of inquiry that appeal to them simply because they can pay for them.
People funding research that interests them seems like a pretty innocuous statement by itself. Sure, it's connection to Epstein is blatantly problematic, but if you remove him specifically from the statement, what is the problem being highlighted?
The article explains this in the first paragraph, does it not?
- ... the mockery made of academic standards when, after donating $200,000 to the psychology department, Epstein was appointed as a visiting fellow there despite a complete lack of appropriate academic qualifications.
- Even after his release from prison, Epstein continued to be a frequent visitor: between 2010 and 2018 Epstein (at that point a registered sex offender) went to the PED offices more than 40 times. During that period he had an on-campus office and a key card and pass code with which he could enter buildings during off-hours.
Why should a benefactor have access to the research lab they fund?
The article also mentions:
- The New York Times concluded that in this case it led researchers “to give credence to some of Mr. Epstein's half-baked scientific musings.” True or not, it should trouble us that a corrupt man was making decisions affecting research at a major U.S. university. He had no academic competence—yet he effectively made choices about which research initiatives were interesting and promising.
So the problem it seems to be highlighting are twofold: (1) The access and "respectability" gained by donating to harvard without intellectual competence behind it, and (2) His ability to "softly dictate" researchers to give credence to his musings.
For what its worth, I disagree with what the article then proceeds to reach for:
> When peer review operates properly, it identifies the best ideas to support, usually by using panels—not individuals—to see to it that a range of views is represented. The process is imperfect, but women, people of color, young scholars, investigators at nonelite universities and individuals promoting ideas that challenge conventional wisdom at least have a chance
- ... the mockery made of academic standards when, after donating $200,000 to the psychology department, Epstein was appointed as a visiting fellow there despite a complete lack of appropriate academic qualifications.
Can we take a moment, and just laugh at the fact that for some reason it's cheaper to buy yourself a visiting fellowship in the Harvard Psych department than it is to buy your kid a seat in the undergraduate psychology program?
Edit: I guess the most most eyebrow-raising revelation for me is that these positions are, in fact, for sale.
To me at least, the direction of scientific progress should be in the hands of scientists, not wealthy donors, big corporations or politicians. When the people who control the funding have their own narrow biases, it can't help but corrupt the results. Often, the results just disappear instead of being published when they're not what they're "supposed" to be.
I think narrow biases and unpublished results happen to some extent anyway with the politics/beauracracy that arises from having a small subset of established scientists vote on which science gets funding. I don't disagree with the concerns about wealthy donors/corporations, and I do think it is a good idea to have a large portion of funding allocated by other scientists. But I also feel a little diversity in funding sources can give labs breathing room to be more creative.
There's also examples like the development of the original birth control pill- which was largely funded by one wealthy woman. I doubt it could have happened in that time period without someone wealthy with independent interests being able to push development.
> People funding research that interests them seems like a pretty innocuous statement by itself. Sure, it's connection to Epstein is blatantly problematic, but if you remove him specifically from the statement, what is the problem being highlighted?
There are two issues here. First, if it would be politically or financially more convenient to not know something, there is no money provided towards knowing it.
Second, in many cases the donors get to decide whether to publish the results after the research has been done. Naturally if only one of the possible results is inconvenient and the study reaches the inconvenient conclusion, that one doesn't get published. Then all your results are totally invalidated by selection bias.
See I think the problem with this article is that it doesn't think it could actually make the case that Epstein could pay for results.
So it basically tries to muddy the waters between "If you give a large chunk of money to a researcher you get to influence what they research" and "You get to influence the output of that research."
Almost everyone agrees the latter is bad, but I think most people believe that you should be able to fund whatever research you want with your own money.
I'm just going to point out that to people that have a concern about wealthy people funding research that is how science has been done long before research grants or anything like that came on the scene.
For a long time art and the sciences were funded by wealthy merchants and kings giving money to people like Lenardo Da Vinci to eat while they worked on their ideas.
Also another point, people worry about the corrupting influence of money on research but there is nothing that stops someone with money from setting up a research lab independent of a university and producing their own research. In fact I would think having the research done with a prestigious university would be a better check on the results because the individuals doing the research are tied deeply into their communities and as such their is more oversight and discussion on the topic.
2. The Wright Bros were funded by themselves. They were motivated by the idea of getting rich selling airplanes. The government funded alternative, the Langley, flopped (literally) into the Potomac.
3. Whittle's jet engine was funded (in part) by a little old lady. Government refused to fund it.
4. The Reich refused to fund jet engines until Heinkel demonstrated a flying prototype. It was financed by Heinkel.
5. The transistor was invented by Bell Labs funded from AT&T's profits.
6. The first transatlantic cable was funded by wealthy investors looking to make money off of it.
7. Several explorers were funded by newspapers in exchange for exclusive story rights.
If people are worried about scientific donors having undue influence, a much cleaner route than trying to stop donations or screen every person is to simply require that donations be anonymous. That way, everyone still has the freedom to sponsor whatever they want, but nobody gets bribed to overlook sex trafficking.
I don't think that works in practice. If you donate money with the goal of advancing some agenda, and it's officially anonymous, you'll find a way of letting the right people know it was you.
> That way, everyone still has the freedom to sponsor whatever they want
That still has a distortion effect on the institution and scientific community. And that's assuming the world's top scientists could never possibly guess that the only rich dude who always talks about X is making large anonymous donations to support research on X...
The correct way to do this is to fund a non-profit that then hires a set of third party reviewers to award grants on a competitive basis around one or more themes. This is how Elon Musk and Bill Gates do things, for example.
But no matter how you package it, anyone with a real reputation has more to gain than to lose by taking money from a pedophile. Harvard's/MIT's admins were trying to protect their faculty's reputation.
There's a comment below about Da Vinci, but I'd say that the problem claimed in this article has been around since Archimedes yelled "Eureka" in his bath. The way science has tried to protect itself has always been when research is published, not when it was funded. But it's also a mistake to think that funders have that much influence on research. Scientists usually study what they want and there's been thousands of years of attempts to develop systems to try force them to study what they're paid for that are still not completely effective.
Where did Epstein get his unfortunate ideas? From other scientists! Young researchers very early learn that their main task is the same as start up founders - to inspire people they talk with about their research in order take their money (or recruit them to the lab). I think that truth and societal value are often easiest to convey but obviously not always.
There's a comment below about Da Vinci, but I'd say that the problem claimed in this article has been around since Archimedes yelled "Eureka" in his bath. The way science has tried to protect itself has always been when research is published, not when it was funded.
This unfortunately comment is filled with bad and dubious comment but this seems notably deceptive. Society has to various extents aimed to protect itself from the very worst behavior and the worst people - and has succeed in to a rather spotty extent, certainly. Still, every stage of science has involved some filtering out of the bad and worst. The increase in science's scale has lessened the degree to which a scientist had to be "respectable" but added filters like objective grant criteria, etc. Still, there's no way a single filtering method can work. You can't count on publications to weed out determined frauds - science counts on a certain ethos from scientists (and counts now less than it should and suffers for this). Science needs a community of honesty and it's significant the number of commentators who can't understand this here.
I chatted with a friend who was in a Harvard class with one of the biology professors funded by Epstein. In like 2015 or so (before Epstein was a huge public deal) someone asked him about it and his response to the class was "What am I supposed to do - tell the sex offender to keep his money so he can spend it on more sex crimes?"
I think the issue is that there is always something in return. If you accepted money and it was truly anonymous and Epstein never talked to the professors or whatever than it would be hard to say its bad. But clearly people (good or bad - but always rich) are getting a lot of prestige, access, bragging rights, or whatever from these type of donations.
I'm with the professor on this one. This practice of shaming organizations because they received cash gifts seems odd to me. Seems like another kind of "first world" angst that I'll be struggling to explain to friends in other countries. It's not like they were naming a building after him.
As for always getting something in return, in economics you must always consider the alternative. The man had millions of dollars. For millions of dollars you can get "something" from all directions. Harvard's refusal to take his money would not have made him nine million dollars poorer. And as long as Harvard-donor-bragging-rights are just as available to anyone as a multi-million dollar beach house would be instead, I don't see why it matters.
That assumes that “wealthy people funding research” is the only source of research funding.
Sure if Epstein was funding a bunch of research 100% we could just ignore it and move on... some man hours wasted. But if the guys he funded got other funding, taking it away from people researching stuff that isn’t eugenics, then there is a problem.
If we want to make speculations of what research could be, I would like to speculate that research could be funded by society as a whole and its benefits go to society as a whole.
>but we have broad evidence that the interests of funders often influence the work done.
As opposed to Government, drug company and institutional funders; they NEVER influence the work done.
Epstein was an evil asshole, and Harvard is a disgusting, sinister institution, but concentrating on rubbish like this overlooks the insane, ridiculous, overt and pervasive problems with science research funding that don't involve funding by the creepy dude who didn't kill himself, and who the media otherwise seems strangely incurious about.
Readit News
https://www.harvard.edu/president/news/2020/report-regarding...
Does a far better job.
1. Jeffrey Epstein gives 9 million dollars to Harvard researchers. 6.5 was for PED, with an additional 23.5 from his foundation. This funds PED's creation
2. Jeffrey Epstein gave $200,000 to Department Chair of Psychology, he applied to be a Visiting Fellow. The Chair supported his application, and Epstein was granted Visiting Fellow status for the 2005-2006 academic year.
3. Jeffrey Epstein was arrested, so he withdrew his application for being a Visiting Fellow for the 2006-2007 academic year.
4. Epstein tries to donate to Harvard again, and Harvard denies him due to his arrest record. He makes no more donations to Harvard despite several professors lobbying administration. He does however introduce several professors to rich philanthropists who do make donations.
5. Epstein maintained a relationship with Martin Novak (director of the PED, which Epstein funded), who let Epstein on campus 40 times between 2010 and 2018. There is no evidence he engaged with any undergrad students. He used these visits to speak with prominent faculty.
There is a long history of great scientific advancements being made by otherwise unsavory people. Werner Von Braun, Ronald Fisher, Francis Galton, just off the top of my head. By all accounts these people legitimately loved science and reason and also held otherwise abhorrent views, and in some cases took abhorrent actions. This is just an ambiguity we have to live with.
The problem people have with Epstein's "support for science" is that he spent his life collecting influential people, and, in at least once notorious instance but likely many others, deploying the influence of those people to his ends, which included the trafficking of minors for rape. One reasonably asks, "was Epstein actually trying to fund science at Harvard? Or was brokering donations for programs he could brag about having a hand in getting off the ground just an easy way to create social bonds with the world's most influential people?" One then looks at what Pinker did for Epstein in 2007 and, probably, quickly finds the answer to that question.
This was also the problem with the MIT Media Lab's policy of denying named donations for Epstein while allowing him to broker donations behind the scenes. They were getting money from powerful people, because of Epstein's work. But MIT and the Media Lab's management missed what Epstein was getting out of the deal.
Epstein's intrest in eugenics is pretty well documented. I don't think it's a stretch to think his special interest in funding an evolution research team at Harvard was directly related to his abhorrent views. Sure his funding probably has had some higher order positive effects but it seems incredibly silly to suggest that such a monsterous person was donating all this money becuase of his passion for science. His constant oversight suggests that he probably had an agenda and use in mind for the research and I find it incredibly hard to believe it was anything good/humanitarian. You also have to keep in mind this is not just a guy with bad views, this is a person who has wielded money and power to directly cause evil for a very long time.
Sure, this article and "people's response" are indeed a reaction to terrible people driving science without any, uh, mediation.
The development of science from the situation of renaissance proto-scientists requiring noble patrons to NSF grants being evaluated based on ostensibly objective criteria was a progressive development.
The rise of direct grants by the very wealthy - for whatever they believe science should be - is a regressive development. It's a development that likely won't destroy science but one which has the potential distort it by moving results in the directions these very wealthy patrons desire.
That’s not clear at all. In fact it’s a quite reasonable interpretation to think all his involvement in academics was a way to impart credibility to himself, credibility which was then exploited to forge relationships with powerful people who helped him get away with raping minors.
Love for science is one thing, love for influence is another. Science at least demands to be critical here and taking a look at which fields he invested is certainly a worthwhile endeavor. For science.
> individuals can pick and choose lines of inquiry
It is not scientific to think that would not influence results. Of course his DNA might have been just a selfless offering for scientific inquiry and maybe the pope was right all along.
Science can nurture naïveté to encourage impartiality. But sometimes you need to know when to drop it.
No one is black or white, they are just shades of grey.
> This is just an ambiguity we have to live with.
This just isn't true. I'm quite sure that Epstein supported what he thought was good science. I'm also quite sure that Epstein had opinions about why his treatment of girls was justified. We do not have to accept that people who have violated our basic ideas about humanity should be allowed to do science. The most obvious example is the controversy around what to do with the results of the Nazi / Unit 731 human torture / experiments[1]. Both the idea that Epstein should be allowed to fund research and the idea that he should not are ethical positions. We should not pretend we don't have a choice.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation#Mod...
I mean, Jeffrey Epstein is a problem of course, and his example helps to illustrate the problem, but the core of the issue is that things cost money, so the people with money call the shots. This can undermine the honesty and independence and objectivity of science, of journalism, of politics, of democracy, or any other aspect of life.
Money is power, and that makes a very unequal distribution of money a problem. To science, but also to many other aspects of our society.
Deleted Comment
Epstein funded his pet research areas, yes. But all sources of funding including government grants do the same, one way or another. And across all rich funders, the variety of interests is very large, and include areas other more institutional funding bureaucracies ignore.
Also, despite Epstein's (somewhat still-underexplained) wealth & largesse, his money was a drop in the bucket. When the article points out that "more than two thirds of Epstein's donations—$6.5 million—went to PED director Martin Nowak" – an already well-funded researcher, it actually undermines its case. Epstein gave less than $10 million total? And to established programs? How does a tiny bit of funding, from an extreme-outlier bete-noire, to some not-even-fringe programs, make any negative general case against private funding?
That such private funding picks a different mix of researchers than the Harvard Professor writing this article would pick is the point - don't send all funding through the exact same credentialed-panels of established academia. Accept some curve-ball initiatives from other uncorrelated piles-of-resources.
The article's one tangible example of some favors flowing from a Harvard academic to Epstein's defense – Epstein's lawyer Dershowitz getting some linguistic advice from Steven Pinker – doesn't involve research funding at all. Someone's high-end legal counsel is being paid specifically to marshal resources & expertise for their defense. There's no distorting quid-pro-quo with regard to other payments: it's a totally up-front fee-for-advocacy relationship. (And that's even before considering Dershowitz's other alleged entanglements in Epstein matters.)
The article makes clear that Epstein was granted physical access to facilities, the title of "visiting fellow at Harvard" in areas of study in which he had no credentials, and getting world-renowned researchers to validate his crackpot theories of racial eugenics due to his wealth.
I mean, you are being reasonable: $10 million in funding is peanuts to Harvard, which has an endowment of almost US $41 billion. But apparently Harvard is willing to lease our their credibility for such "a tiny bit" of money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Stewart#Stock_trading_c...
https://www.google.com/search?q=harvard+endowment&oq=harvard...
But unless he was sneaking in after-hours to change experiments' results, it doesn't imply any research was distorted. Even something like "key card access" may have been entirely ceremonial in practice, if his actual visits were just scheduled meetings with real staff members.
In fact, as an example of the kind of 'aura-of-respectability' he was purchasing, it's an example of how the research may have been left uninfluenced – because other trinkets-of-association were delivered. If he got some really, really expensive equivalents of 'Harvard Sweatshirts' for his money, it's less likely he'd be changing lines-of-inquiry in research programs.
I don't find the 'visiting fellow' thing very significant. Harvard & others seem fairly generous with such empty titles, a bit like honorary degrees, that cost them no money but get some funding or reflected-glory back on them. (And, it's not clear if this particular credentialist tchotchke was pre- or post- Epstein's first conviction.)
You are of course correct that it's sometimes surprising the tiny amounts of money people commit ethical infractions to chase. But there's no evidence, or anecdotes, in this article that rich-person money is more corrupting in research matters than that from large institutions, including foundations & the government. The favor-trading, citation-log-rolling, buttering-up, ego-stroking, clique-protecting and everything else academia is known for seems just as bad, or worse, among those competing for traditional "panel-allocated" resources as among those receiving rich-person grants.
Ironically, if she'd simply said nothing to the FBI, she would have walked.
This is why free markets work better, because there are multiple paymasters with varying points of view, not just one.
Do you have more information on this? Is there evidence that funding recipients Martin Nowak and George Church actually had their area of study directed by Epstein, or that the science was fundamentally flawed.
On a conceptual level, there is no reason that evil people cant use dirty money to fund good academics researchers that they happen to find interesting.
Dead Comment
I can't say I know anyone who would be __ethically__ opposed to insider trading. From a regulatory view point most people would be against it, but I don't think anyone views it as a ethical issue.
2 million is not that much. When you add up research assistantship labor costs, scientific equipment and consumable reagents/materials, it depletes faster than you'd like. And our lab is quite small (~5 students); large ivy league research labs often have a couple dozen people.
Some grant-making-organization and state and private foundations now may have degenerated to the point that they are nothing but schemes for financing someone's pet ideas. But I will claim that at their best, they are better than that.
It seems like it's fashionable to dump on bureaucracies making decisions based on ostensibly objective criteria and assume that their decisions are no better than the pet of ideas of utterly vile people. But I'll stand against fashion and claim that isn't true.
Not a big fan of these 'drop in the bucket' arguments. A breakthrough scientific idea can cost anywhere between 0 dollars and a billion dollars. We don't want that breakthrough to be in the field of eugenics.
Was there actual damage done by transferring it to a legitimate research group, doing real research, that had to pass many levels of review (whatever its funding)? If not given to a Harvard research lab, might that $6 million not have done even worse damage elsewhere?
$6M is the equivalent of a few McDonald's franchises.
We are talking about a billionaire EVIL villain. The labs were absolutely compiling supplemental research or other dirty deeds.
Hands are 10x dirtier than public will ever know.
This is state intelligence not psycho playboy.
The Epstein affair brings to light a much larger problem: it undermines the integrity of the research enterprise when individuals can pick and choose lines of inquiry that appeal to them simply because they can pay for them.
People funding research that interests them seems like a pretty innocuous statement by itself. Sure, it's connection to Epstein is blatantly problematic, but if you remove him specifically from the statement, what is the problem being highlighted?
- ... the mockery made of academic standards when, after donating $200,000 to the psychology department, Epstein was appointed as a visiting fellow there despite a complete lack of appropriate academic qualifications.
- Even after his release from prison, Epstein continued to be a frequent visitor: between 2010 and 2018 Epstein (at that point a registered sex offender) went to the PED offices more than 40 times. During that period he had an on-campus office and a key card and pass code with which he could enter buildings during off-hours.
Why should a benefactor have access to the research lab they fund?
The article also mentions:
- The New York Times concluded that in this case it led researchers “to give credence to some of Mr. Epstein's half-baked scientific musings.” True or not, it should trouble us that a corrupt man was making decisions affecting research at a major U.S. university. He had no academic competence—yet he effectively made choices about which research initiatives were interesting and promising.
So the problem it seems to be highlighting are twofold: (1) The access and "respectability" gained by donating to harvard without intellectual competence behind it, and (2) His ability to "softly dictate" researchers to give credence to his musings.
For what its worth, I disagree with what the article then proceeds to reach for:
> When peer review operates properly, it identifies the best ideas to support, usually by using panels—not individuals—to see to it that a range of views is represented. The process is imperfect, but women, people of color, young scholars, investigators at nonelite universities and individuals promoting ideas that challenge conventional wisdom at least have a chance
Can we take a moment, and just laugh at the fact that for some reason it's cheaper to buy yourself a visiting fellowship in the Harvard Psych department than it is to buy your kid a seat in the undergraduate psychology program?
Edit: I guess the most most eyebrow-raising revelation for me is that these positions are, in fact, for sale.
There's also examples like the development of the original birth control pill- which was largely funded by one wealthy woman. I doubt it could have happened in that time period without someone wealthy with independent interests being able to push development.
There are two issues here. First, if it would be politically or financially more convenient to not know something, there is no money provided towards knowing it.
Second, in many cases the donors get to decide whether to publish the results after the research has been done. Naturally if only one of the possible results is inconvenient and the study reaches the inconvenient conclusion, that one doesn't get published. Then all your results are totally invalidated by selection bias.
It also provides the opportunity to do this:
https://xkcd.com/882/
Study doesn't say what you want? Fund another one, maybe tweak it a little, sooner or later it will, and you only publish the one that does.
So it basically tries to muddy the waters between "If you give a large chunk of money to a researcher you get to influence what they research" and "You get to influence the output of that research."
Almost everyone agrees the latter is bad, but I think most people believe that you should be able to fund whatever research you want with your own money.
For a long time art and the sciences were funded by wealthy merchants and kings giving money to people like Lenardo Da Vinci to eat while they worked on their ideas.
Also another point, people worry about the corrupting influence of money on research but there is nothing that stops someone with money from setting up a research lab independent of a university and producing their own research. In fact I would think having the research done with a prestigious university would be a better check on the results because the individuals doing the research are tied deeply into their communities and as such their is more oversight and discussion on the topic.
How were those financed?
Is there any evidence of bias toward or away from specific areas based on moneyed, political, or other interests?
1. Einstein was funded by himself.
2. The Wright Bros were funded by themselves. They were motivated by the idea of getting rich selling airplanes. The government funded alternative, the Langley, flopped (literally) into the Potomac.
3. Whittle's jet engine was funded (in part) by a little old lady. Government refused to fund it.
4. The Reich refused to fund jet engines until Heinkel demonstrated a flying prototype. It was financed by Heinkel.
5. The transistor was invented by Bell Labs funded from AT&T's profits.
6. The first transatlantic cable was funded by wealthy investors looking to make money off of it.
7. Several explorers were funded by newspapers in exchange for exclusive story rights.
That still has a distortion effect on the institution and scientific community. And that's assuming the world's top scientists could never possibly guess that the only rich dude who always talks about X is making large anonymous donations to support research on X...
The correct way to do this is to fund a non-profit that then hires a set of third party reviewers to award grants on a competitive basis around one or more themes. This is how Elon Musk and Bill Gates do things, for example.
But no matter how you package it, anyone with a real reputation has more to gain than to lose by taking money from a pedophile. Harvard's/MIT's admins were trying to protect their faculty's reputation.
Where did Epstein get his unfortunate ideas? From other scientists! Young researchers very early learn that their main task is the same as start up founders - to inspire people they talk with about their research in order take their money (or recruit them to the lab). I think that truth and societal value are often easiest to convey but obviously not always.
This unfortunately comment is filled with bad and dubious comment but this seems notably deceptive. Society has to various extents aimed to protect itself from the very worst behavior and the worst people - and has succeed in to a rather spotty extent, certainly. Still, every stage of science has involved some filtering out of the bad and worst. The increase in science's scale has lessened the degree to which a scientist had to be "respectable" but added filters like objective grant criteria, etc. Still, there's no way a single filtering method can work. You can't count on publications to weed out determined frauds - science counts on a certain ethos from scientists (and counts now less than it should and suffers for this). Science needs a community of honesty and it's significant the number of commentators who can't understand this here.
So you “cancel” a guy that doesn't need employment or advertisements to get anything done, by condemning anyone that received money from him.
What do people want to happen to the money instead?
What punishment do people think they are enacting?
Has anyone actually thought that far?
I think the issue is that there is always something in return. If you accepted money and it was truly anonymous and Epstein never talked to the professors or whatever than it would be hard to say its bad. But clearly people (good or bad - but always rich) are getting a lot of prestige, access, bragging rights, or whatever from these type of donations.
As for always getting something in return, in economics you must always consider the alternative. The man had millions of dollars. For millions of dollars you can get "something" from all directions. Harvard's refusal to take his money would not have made him nine million dollars poorer. And as long as Harvard-donor-bragging-rights are just as available to anyone as a multi-million dollar beach house would be instead, I don't see why it matters.
Sure if Epstein was funding a bunch of research 100% we could just ignore it and move on... some man hours wasted. But if the guys he funded got other funding, taking it away from people researching stuff that isn’t eugenics, then there is a problem.
Should society spend more money on research? Yes
Should society ban individuals from spending money on research? No
Dead Comment
As opposed to Government, drug company and institutional funders; they NEVER influence the work done.
Epstein was an evil asshole, and Harvard is a disgusting, sinister institution, but concentrating on rubbish like this overlooks the insane, ridiculous, overt and pervasive problems with science research funding that don't involve funding by the creepy dude who didn't kill himself, and who the media otherwise seems strangely incurious about.