Meet three scientists who said no to Epstein

Hundreds of scientists are mentioned in the recent trove of released emails related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, who was convicted of soliciting a minor in 2008 and who died by suicide in a New York City jail shortly after his arrest in 2019 on sex trafficking charges. Epstein relished connections with high-profile academics. Some took his money and used it for research; others were entertained lavishly at one of Epstein’s homes. Many of the scientists implicated in previous revelations admitted they had made a serious mistake. Several have been knocked off lofty professional pedestals since the latest releases by the U.S. Department of Justice (see sidebar, below).

Many of the scientists Epstein courted were already well-established and well-funded. So why didn’t they all just say no? Science talked with three who did just that. Here’s how Epstein approached them, and why they refused to have anything to do with him.

David Agus

University of Southern California cancer researcher and founding CEO of Ellison Medical Institute

Agus, a professor of medicine and bioengineering, never met or spoke with Epstein. But he spent 7 years saying no to him.

Agus received his first email from Epstein in 2012. “I had given a TED talk, and I think he had an affinity for TED speakers,” Agus recalls. “He wrote me, ‘Can we meet next time you’re in New York?’”

After telling his assistant to raise the possibility of a meeting, Agus went online and learned more about Epstein, including his 2008 conviction. He also reached out to a few people he knew from among a list of names Epstein had mentioned in a subsequent email. “They all said the same thing: ‘Stay away from him. He’s a bad character.’”

Agus visited New York City regularly in his role as a medical correspondent for CBS News, and he says Epstein would often email him after a piece had aired with the same request. Agus told his assistant to keep putting Epstein off, saying he was too busy. The exchanges continued until shortly before Epstein was arrested in 2019.

Why didn’t Agus just tell Epstein why he was unwilling to meet?

“I don’t want to upset a powerful person,” Agus says. “It wasn’t my job to judge him, and I’m not a confrontational individual. I’m also not a moralist, and I don’t pretend to know the whole story.”

“But at the same time, I’m not going to meet with a person with [the] history that I saw online,” Agus continues. “To me, it was very simple: Don’t associate with him.”

Scott Aaronson

University of Texas at Austin computer scientist

Aaronson first crossed paths with Epstein as an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2010. One of Epstein’s emissaries took him to lunch at a Cambridge, Massachusetts, deli and then sent him an email describing how Epstein wanted to give him money to do research on cryptography using DNA and other molecules, a topic that interested both men.

Aaronson, who studies the capabilities and limits of quantum computers, did not know Epstein’s past and was initially intrigued. “I get contacted every day by random people I don’t know who claim they’ve solved the P versus NP problem [predicting how many problems are truly intractable],” he explains. “But a rich guy who potentially wanted to fund my research? That seemed unusual. I also knew that [Epstein] had some relationship with Seth Lloyd, who was my colleague at MIT.”

Instead of Googling Epstein, Aaronson, then 29, turned to what he considered an even more reliable source: his mother. She did some checking. “Be careful not to get sucked up in the slime-machine going on here,” she wrote back, adding, “Since you don’t care that much about money, they can’t buy you.”

Her wise counsel, Aaronson says, saved him from doing something he later would have greatly regretted. “If not for my mom, I might have gone and talked at a workshop to kick off the project,” he says. “I don’t think doing that would have made me complicit. But, you know, it would have been very embarrassing for me.”

Aaronson isn’t surprised that some colleagues, including Lloyd, fell into Epstein’s orbit. “Academics tend to have this way of interacting with people that works really well when there is mutual good faith,” Aaronson says. “But it breaks down when that doesn’t exist. And I think a lot of academics were just not prepared to deal with someone like him.”

Taking more time to vet potential donors is one way to avoid future scandals, Aaronson says, because there will always be financial incentives to say yes. “I’ve had federal funding in the past, but right now I don’t,” he says. “To be honest, I’d be happy to find a rich person, but one with better morals than Jeffrey Epstein.”

Sean Carroll

Johns Hopkins University theoretical physicist and science popularizer

Carroll says he was also ignorant of Epstein’s criminal past in 2010, when someone associated with the California Institute of Technology, where Carroll was then a physics professor, invited him and his wife to dinner. His host interrupted the meal to call Epstein and then handed Carroll the phone.

“It was a 2-minute conversation, and frankly, it didn’t make much of an impression on me at the time,” Carroll says. “As best I can remember, we talked about the Big Bang and dark energy and things like that.”

But Carroll says when he told others about the call, including his wife, science writer Jennifer Ouellette, we “were rolling our eyes.” In a recent blog post, Carroll said Epstein came off as a “standard, fast-talking charlatan who trotted out lots of big words with no real understanding [of them].”

A few months later, Carroll received an email invitation to a scientific conference at Epstein’s home on his private Caribbean island. “It was billed as a workshop of scientists from different fields, something that I usually find appealing, and it sounded like fun,” he says. But he declined after learning a bit more about the arrangements.

“Jennifer was also invited,” Carroll recounts. “But when we asked if she would be a participant, they said ‘she could go shopping with the other wives.’ And we were repulsed by that sexist attitude.”

“I had no idea through any of this that he was a convicted sex offender,” Carroll adds. “That would have made it a much easier decision for me. But in 2010 he was not a famous person. If I had tried really hard, I could have found out about [his criminal record], but the thought that I would really have to try hard never entered my mind.”

Carroll says the lure of possible funding wasn’t an issue for him. “I’m not desperate for money,” he says. “And besides, at the end of your life, who you are is the accumulation of the things you did. It’s not just how much money you got.”