The “food computer” was the flagship technology at the Media Lab’s Open Agriculture Initiative. The purpose of the hydroponic device was to rapidly grow plants to exact specifications. Program the right amounts of water, nutrients, and light into the plastic box, and it would automatically grow plants up to four times faster than normal. The device had all the hallmarks of sugar-daddy science: It looked amazing, and nothing added up. As a crop scientist, I’d worked in room-sized versions of this back in 2001, and the equipment was already dated by then. The speed gains its creators touted—especially when the food computer wasn’t as nearly as revolutionary or sophisticated as publicity made it out to be—just didn’t smell right.

Sure enough, the boxes did not function as promised, and news reports portray a Theranos-style deception. “Ahead of big demonstrations of the devices with MIT Media Lab funders, staff were told to place plants grown elsewhere into the devices,” Business Insider reported. “One former researcher,” declared a subsequent story in the The Chronicle of Higher Education, “described buying lavender plants from a gardening store, dusting the dirt off the roots so it looked as if they’d been grown without soil, and placing them in the food computer ahead of a photo shoot. The resulting photos were sent to news media and put on the project’s website.”

Full disclosure: When the Media Lab announced in 2017 that it was looking for innovators who didn’t have a conventional research background, I applied. I’d been working in the indoor-farm industry for years as a fixer; companies hired me for food-safety work, but then I wound up dealing with a range of brick-and-mortar problems that eluded the tech world—things like cold-chain logistics, pest control, water chemistry, security, breaking production logjams, and keeping staff from getting electrocuted. Agricultural and food-systems design is my wheelhouse. The food computer is nice, I told the Media Lab. But if you really want to knock things loose, hire me.

It didn’t. At the time, I didn’t think much of not getting the job. Agriculture is an offbeat niche for MIT, and no doubt the Media Lab had many other applicants. I already had a thriving business. No harm, no foul.

But in recent weeks—like many scientists who’ve worked real-world problems adjacent to the Media Lab—I’ve been asking why someone like me isn’t a good fit for high-profile science, but “food computer” makers and convicted pedophiles are.

The Media Lab took sugar-daddy science to a new level. Epstein’s interests in science, like a desire to “seed the human race” by impregnating dozens of women and to have his head and penis frozen after his death, were more literally sexual than most. But he didn’t invent the hustle. It’s an old philanthropy problem: Donor gratification takes precedence over results.