Give the money back.

Anyone who took money or accrued influence from accused child rapist Jeffrey Epstein, who died of an apparent suicide in jail, should give that money back. Or they should donate an equivalent amount to someone who will help people with it.

It would be the smallest quantum of reparations. MIT knows this; after apologies from Joichi Ito, head of MIT’s Media Lab, and physicist Seth Lloyd for accepting Epstein’s money, university president Rafael Reif announced Thursday that the school would be giving away $800,000, the amount Epstein had donated over the past 20 years. Harvard, thus far, doesn’t get it. In July, school representatives said the university had no plans to return $6.5 million that helped set up its Program for Evolutionary Dynamics.

Giving away the money would begin to clean up the gross, topologically complex web of influence trading that Epstein helped weave. Before and after his year in prison, in 2008, Epstein provided money, attention, access, or combinations of all that to scientists—among them biologist Stephen Jay Gould, biochemist George Church, evolutionary scientist Martin Nowak, linguist Steven Pinker, physicist Murray Gell-Mann, physicist Stephen Hawking, and AI researcher Marvin Minsky, among many others.

Epstein was, in the parlance of the sciences, a marker. Like the radioactive tracer you get injected with before an fMRI, his villainy illuminates how the connections among a relatively small clique of American intellectuals allowed them, privately, to define the last three decades of science, technology, and culture. It was a Big-Ideas Industrial Complex of conferences, research institutions, virtual salons, and even magazines, and Jeffrey Epstein bought his way in.

How did these geniuses find themselves cozying up to a child rapist? In putting his apologies on the record with Stat reporter Sharon Begley, Church chalked it up to “nerd tunnel vision.” Ito, who also let Epstein contribute to his personal technology investment funds, called it “an error in judgment.” (Two people affiliated with the Media Lab have announced their departures as a result.)

As reasons to associate with a child rapist, tunnel vision seems less likely than dollars and network effects. Epstein’s network had the literary agent and superconnector John Brockman as a prominent node, and Epstein’s money seems to have followed Brockman's edges. In addition to representing an elite crew of popular and well-compensated writers about technology and science, Brockman had been a fixture in the tech and culture worlds since his time running multimedia events alongside Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s. He also runs Edge, a sort of salon that for 20 years, until 2018, asked an annual big question of intellectuals and published their answers. Data on decades of Epstein’s charitable giving acquired by the Miami Herald shows Epstein gave $505,000 to the Edge Foundation from 1998 to 2008.

As the writer Evgeny Morozov, himself a Brockman client, argues in The New Republic, the agent became an “intellectual enabler” for Epstein. Morozov shares an email thread in which Brockman encourages him to meet Epstein even though he got “into trouble” and landed in jail for a year. Morozov writes that he declined.

Epstein, it’s easy to surmise, hoped to launder his reputation by association with all this—to purchase secular indulgences from these intellectual high priests. Or maybe he just wanted to feel smart. According to one account, Epstein’s actual interest in science was at best dilettantish; he’d ask big questions but his attention would wander, and he’d change the subject by saying, “What does that got to do with pussy?”