Among several fridges inside the Harvard Medical School lab of renowned geneticist George Church is one devoted to housing tubes of human blood and spit destined to have their cellular contents cracked open, the DNA letters read out and posted to the wilds of the open internet. Eventually.
These samples, donated by participants in the Personal Genome Project, can sometimes sit in the lab for years until there’s sufficient funding for them to be sequenced. Which is why, in the summer of 2013, the project’s director of research — a young scientist named Mad Ball — was unnerved to learn that another member of the team was pushing to prioritize sequencing one sample that had been in the fridge only a few weeks. The request was unusual enough that Ball went into the records of PGP participants and punched in the ID number on the sample to see what name would come up.
At first, it didn’t ring a bell. But when Ball googled the name, “Jeffrey Epstein,” they discovered news stories about a man whom dozens of girls had accused of sexually assaulting them, a man for whom Florida prosecutors had made the unusual decision to drop local law enforcement’s recommendations of charging multiple accounts of unlawful sex with minors in favor of a single solicitation of prostitution charge. It was that man, a registered sex offender, whose blood now sat in the PGP fridge not far from Ball’s spot on the bench.
In a daze, they immediately packed their belongings and headed for the exit, setting off a crisis in Church’s lab.
“It was such a shock to me, I didn’t even have words,” Ball told STAT. “It looked like a quid pro quo sort of thing, which would have been upsetting but not super upsetting if it wasn’t a bad person but just a rich person. But this was a rich, bad person, and it looked awful.”
Some of Church’s connections to Epstein, which go back more than two decades, have been public for years. But the furor Epstein’s involvement in the Personal Genome Project ignited among the project’s staff has not been previously reported. Interviews with lab members about the 2013 incident and emails obtained by STAT show that internal pushback succeeded in stopping any special treatment. But they also suggest Church learned more details about Epstein’s activities at that time than he has previously acknowledged — a revelation that takes on increased importance in light of new evidence in the Epstein files released by the Department of Justice that show Church received funding from Epstein or through his associates in the years immediately following the blowup.
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