Interviews with more than a dozen of his acquaintances, as well as public documents, show that he used the same tactics to insinuate his way into an elite scientific community, thus allowing him to pursue his interests in eugenics and other fringe fields like cryogenics. Jeffrey Epstein, pictured in 2017 by the New York State Sex Offender Registry. Credit:AP Lawyers for Epstein, who has pleaded not guilty to the sex-trafficking charges, did not respond to requests for comment. Even after his 2008 conviction on charges of soliciting prostitution from a minor, Epstein attracted a glittering array of prominent scientists. Loading

They included the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who discovered the quark; theoretical physicist and bestselling author Stephen Hawking; palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould; Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and bestselling author; George M. Church, a molecular engineer who has worked to identify genes that could be altered to create superior humans; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek, also a Nobel laureate. The lure for some of the scientists was Epstein's money. He dangled financing for their pet projects. Some of the scientists said that the prospect of financing blinded them to the seriousness of his sexual transgressions, and even led them to give credence to some of Epstein's half-baked scientific musings. Jaron Lanier, the father of virtual-reality. Credit:Washington Post Scientists gathered at dinner parties at Epstein's Manhattan mansion, where Dom Pérignon and expensive wines flowed freely, even though Epstein did not drink. He hosted buffet lunches at Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, which he had helped start with a $US6.5 million donation. Others flew to conferences sponsored by Epstein in the US Virgin Islands and were feted on his private island there. Once, the scientists — including Hawking — crowded on board a submarine that Epstein had chartered.

The Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker said he was invited by colleagues — including Martin Nowak, a Harvard professor of mathematics and biology, and the theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss — to "salons and coffee klatsches" at which Epstein would hold court. While some of Pinker's peers hailed Epstein as brilliant, Pinker described him as an "intellectual impostor." "He would abruptly change the subject, ADD-style, dismiss an observation with an adolescent wisecrack," Pinker said. Loading Another scientist cultivated by Epstein, Jaron Lanier, a prolific author who is a founding father of virtual reality, said that Epstein's ideas did not amount to science, in that they did not lend themselves to rigorous proof. Lanier said Epstein had once hypothesised that atoms behaved like investors in a marketplace.

Lanier said he had declined any funding from Epstein and that he had met with him only once after Epstein's 2008 guilty plea. Epstein was willing to finance research that others viewed as bizarre. He told one scientist that he was bankrolling efforts to identify a mysterious particle that might trigger the feeling that someone is watching you. At one session at Harvard, Epstein criticised efforts to reduce starvation and provide health care to the poor because doing so increased the risk of overpopulation, said Pinker, who was there. Pinker said he had rebutted the argument, citing research showing that high rates of infant mortality simply caused people to have more children. Epstein seemed annoyed, and a Harvard colleague later told Pinker that he had been "voted off the island" and was no longer welcome at Epstein's gatherings. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video Then there was Epstein's interest in eugenics.

On multiple occasions starting in the early 2000s, Epstein told scientists and businessmen about his ambitions to use his New Mexico ranch as a base where women would be inseminated with his sperm and would give birth to his babies, according to two award-winning scientists and an adviser to large companies and wealthy individuals, all of whom Epstein told about it. It was not a secret. The adviser, for example, said he was told about the plans not only by Epstein, at a gathering at his Manhattan town house, but also by at least one prominent member of the business community. One of the scientists said Epstein divulged his idea in 2001 at a dinner at the same town house; the other recalled Epstein discussing it with him at a 2006 conference that he hosted in St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. The idea struck all three as far-fetched and disturbing. There is no indication that it would have been against the law. Once, at a dinner at Epstein's mansion on Manhattan's Upper East Side, Lanier said he talked to a scientist who told him that Epstein's goal was to have 20 women at a time impregnated at his 10,000-square-metre Zorro Ranch in a tiny town outside Santa Fe. Lanier said the scientist identified herself as working at NASA, but he did not remember her name. According to Lanier, the NASA scientist said Epstein had based his idea for a baby ranch on accounts of the Repository for Germinal Choice, which was to be stocked with the sperm of Nobel laureates who wanted to strengthen the human gene pool. (Only one Nobel Prize winner has acknowledged contributing sperm to it. The repository discontinued operations in 1999.)

Lanier, the virtual-reality creator and author, said he had the impression that Epstein was using the dinner parties — where some guests were attractive women with impressive academic credentials — to screen candidates to bear Epstein's children. Epstein made no secret of his interest in tinkering with genes — and in perpetuating his own DNA. One adherent of transhumanism said that he and Epstein discussed the financier's interest in cryogenics, an unproven science in which people's bodies are frozen to be brought back to life in the future. Epstein told this person that he wanted his head and penis to be frozen. Southern Trust Co., Epstein's Virgin Island-incorporated business, disclosed in a local filing that it was engaged in DNA analysis. Calls to Southern Trust, which sponsored a science and math fair for school children in the Virgin Islands in 2014, were not returned. In 2011, a charity established by Epstein gave $US20,000 to the Worldwide Transhumanist Association, which now operates under the name Humanity Plus. The group's website says that its goal is "to deeply influence a new generation of thinkers who dare to envision humanity's next steps."

Epstein's foundation, which is now defunct, also gave $US100,000 to pay the salary of Ben Goertzel, vice chairman of Humanity Plus, according to Goertzel's résumé. "I have no desire to talk about Epstein right now," Goertzel said in an email to The New York Times. "The stuff I'm reading about him in the papers is pretty disturbing and goes way beyond what I thought his misdoings and kinks were. Yecch." Alan M. Dershowitz, a professor emeritus of law at Harvard, recalled that at a lunch Epstein hosted in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he steered the conversation toward the question of how humans could be improved genetically. Dershowitz said he was appalled, given the Nazis' use of eugenics to justify their genocidal effort to purify the Aryan race. Yet the lunches persisted. "Everyone speculated about whether these scientists were more interested in his views or more interested in his money," said Dershowitz, who was one of Epstein's defense lawyers in the 2008 case.

The New York Times