The New York Times reported Wednesday that Jeffrey Epstein, who has been charged with sex trafficking dozens of underage girls, spoke with multiple scientists and others he lured into his circle about a “disturbing” scheme to “seed the human race with his DNA” by impregnating 20 women at a time at his massive New Mexico ranch.
Citing award-winning scientists and high-powered businessmen, the Times reports that over the years Epstein confided to multiple scientists his vision of spreading his DNA through mass impregnation. The scheme, the Times explains, reflected the financier’s “longstanding fascination with what has become known as transhumanism: the science of improving the human population through technologies like genetic engineering and artificial intelligence.”
The Times spoke with over a dozen of Epstein’s acquaintances and reviewed public documents that detailed Epstein’s largely successful attempts to “insinuate himself into an elite scientific community, thus allowing him to pursue his interests in eugenics and other fringe fields like cryonics.”
Two award-winning scientists and one high-powered business adviser told the Times that starting in the early 2000s, Epstein on multiple occasions “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.” That scheme was “not a secret,” the Times underscores; Epstein would allegedly openly discuss this idea with acquaintances at dinners and events.
The plan, according to one source, was “to have 20 women at a time impregnated at his 33,000-square-foot Zorro Ranch in a tiny town outside Santa Fe.” The idea was inspired by the Repository for Germinal Choice, a repository for the sperm of Nobel laureates for the supposed betterment of the human race that shut down in 1999.
And Epstein’s strange pseudo-scientific transhumanism didn’t stop there: he also reportedly got into cryonics, the freezing of a body to be regenerated at a future date, and told one source that he specifically “wanted his head and penis to be frozen.”
Epstein’s alleged ploy was to lure scientists into his circle by offering to potentially fund their “pet projects,” the Times explains. Among the prominent scientists he attempted to pull into his bizarre, pseudo-scientific schemes were theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who discovered the quark, evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, neurologist Oliver Sacks, theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek, cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, and molecular engineer George M. Church, whose work on identifying genes to help “create superior humans” was likely particularly appealing to Epstein.
“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 Mr. Epstein’s half-baked scientific musings,” the Times notes. (Read the full report here.)