by Whitney Webb

The Last American Vagabond

CRISPR gene-editing expert Eric Lander, Biden’s director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, is awaiting Senate confirmation to serve in a new Cabinet-level position in the Biden administration. Jeffrey Epstein, the eugenicist pedophile and sex trafficker, bragged about funding Lander’s research and was photographed taking part in at least one meeting with him.

Shortly before he took office, President Joe Biden announced that he would be elevating the director Office of Science and Technology Policy to a cabinet-level position, meaning that his nominee to lead that office, geneticist Eric Lander, would require confirmation by the US Senate. Lander is currently serving as director of that office, but has yet to serve in cabinet-level capacity as he awaits confirmation. 

Mainstream media reports described Biden’s move to place Lander in his cabinet as “meant to highlight his commitment to science,” which has been used to contrast his approach with that of Trump, who was accused of second-guessing “authoritative” voices from academia and the medical establishment. Lander is deemed to be one such “authoritative” voice, having previously served as external co-chair on former President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. 

However, Biden placing Lander in this role begs the question of exactly what type of science he will promote in his new position, as eugenicist and intelligence-linked pedophile Jeffrey Epstein bragged on his website about having “had the priviledge [sic] of sponsoring” Lander’s research via the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation. Lander’s spokesperson told the New York Times in 2019 that “Mr. Epstein appears to have made up lots of things and this seems to be among them,” regarding whether or not Lander had indeed received funding from Epstein. 

In addition to the issue of funding from Epstein, Lander, who is also a biology professor at MIT, is known to have met with Epstein at least once, as he was pictured taking part in a 2012 meeting with Epstein at the office of Harvard’s Martin Nowak, a mathematical biologist who received millions in funding from Epstein. After Epstein’s 2019 arrest, Lander claimed that he had been invited to the meeting by Nowak and had been unaware of who was set to attend the event. He additionally stated that he “later learned about [Epstein’s] more sordid history” and denied having had a relationship with Epstein.

Yet, there remains the issue that Epstein himself included Lander in a list of scientists he sponsored, with the other scientists on that list having indeed been supported by Epstein in some fashion. If we are to believe Lander, it remains unclear why Epstein, before he became so infamous, would falsely claim to fund Lander and why Lander would wait to deny any association until only after Epstein’s arrest. Given that the other scientists listed alongside Lander on Epstein’s website did receive funding from his foundation, it seems unlikely that Epstein would deceptively throw in Lander’s name among a list of several other scientists he was funding at a time, particularly when he was not yet publicly controversial and did not present such a grave risk to his associates’ reputations. 

However, Lander’s denials seem to have been more than sufficient for some mainstream media outlets following his nomination to serve in the Biden administration, with some outlets now claiming that Lander was not reported to have received funding from Epstein, despite Epstein’s own claims to the contrary. For instance, BuzzFeed wrote on January 19, 2021 that Lander “has not been reported to have received any money from Epstein”.

The Broad Institute, Silicon Valley and Intelligence

Despite Lander’s denials of a personal relationship, Epstein also had very close ties to Lander’s employer, MIT. Epstein donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the institution and Epstein was also used as a channel for making donations to MIT by billionaire Bill Gates. Gates has yet to explain why he would funnel his donations through Epstein as opposed to publicly donating via his well-known “philanthropic” foundation. Epstein’s funding of the MIT Media Lab in particular led to the resignation of its former director Joi Ito in September 2019 following Epstein’s arrest and subsequent “suicide.”

In addition, Epstein was particularly close to one of the biggest names at MIT, the late artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky. Minsky once organized a two-day symposium on artificial intelligence at Epstein’s private island in 2002 and Epstein victims have alleged that they were forced by Epstein to engage in sex acts with Minsky. Both Minsky and Eric Lander were corporate fellows of the Thinking Machines corporation, a DARPA contractor that made supercomputers in the late 1980s and early 1990s. That company’s various components were acquired by a web of intelligence-linked companies like CIA-linked Oracle and IBM while many of its former engineers left for Sun Microsystems, where future Google CEO Eric Schmidt was then serving as Chief Technology Officer.

Lander, more recently, has again become closely associated with tech companies deeply tied to the US national security state as the founding director of the Broad Institute, an independent genomic research institution partnered with both MIT and Harvard. Incidentally, MIT and Harvard are the two academic institutions most closely linked to Epstein’s “philanthropy,” particularly in the field in which the Broad Institute specializes. 

The Broad Institute depends heavily on “private philanthropy” according to its website and its board of directors includes Apple chairman, Arthur Levinson; chairman of the McKinsey Global Institute, James Manyika; current chairman and former CEO of IBM, Louis Gerstner Jr; and former Google CEO and current chair of the National Security Commission on AI, Eric Schmidt. Also on the board is Seth Klarman, owner of the Times of Israel and a major donor to the DNC last election cycle. Klarman’s family foundation has donated heavily to the Broad Institute. In addition, Klarman announced his rejection of former President Trump in a coordinated PR push alongside Leslie Wexner, Epstein’s main backer who was integral to his intelligence activities and sex trafficking operation, in 2018. More recently, he was outed as the main financing source for the dysfunctional Iowa Caucus app in the most recent DNC primaries.

Right before Lander joined the Biden administration, the Broad Institute announced a new partnership with tech giants Microsoft and Google subsidiary Verily, further reflecting the Broad Institute’s ties to Silicon Valley. As part of that partnership, Microsoft and Google will share the companies’ cloud data and AI technologies with a “global network of more than 168,000 health and life sciences partners” to accelerate the Terra platform. Terra, originally developed by the Broad Institute and Google’s Verily, is an “open data ecosystem” focused on biomedical research, specifically the fields of cancer genomics, population genetics, and viral genomics. The biomedical data Terra amasses includes not only genetic data but also medical-imaging, biometric signals, and electronic health records. 

In the case of Google, the data accessed via this partnership will likely inform their obvious AI healthcare ambitions, some of which are being pursued in partnership with the US military. Google recently announced a partnership with the Pentagon to “predictively diagnose” cancer and COVID-19 using AI. Google’s ties to the US military have become overt in recent years and the company is well represented on the National Security Commission on AI (NSCAI), which is chaired by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. In the case of Microsoft, the company was recently awarded the massive JEDI cloud contract by the Pentagon, though litigation may soon change that. Microsoft also recently launched a new “secret” cloud service for US intelligence and classified government data systems and, like Google, are also well represented on the NSCAI. 

In addition, Microsoft as well as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt have ties to Israeli intelligence, particularly Israel’s Unit 8200. Microsoft’s ties to Start-Up Nation Central, Unit 8200 fronts, and Isabel Maxwell (Ghislaine Maxwell’s sister) have been discussed at length in previous articles. Eric Schmidt, among other connections, helped finance and launch Team8, the start-up accelerator for Unit 8200 alumni set up by the unit’s former commander Nadiv Zafrir. Team8 controversially hired Mike Rogers, former director of the US intelligence agency the NSA, and is also associated with the private company IronNet Security of another former NSA director, Keith Alexander. 

These US-Israel intelligence ties are notable given the Epstein connections explored earlier in this article, as many of Epstein’s activities – from sex trafficking and sexual blackmail to money laundering – were done on behalf of both US and Israeli intelligence agencies, specifically factions within both intelligence communities that share ties to the same organized crime syndicate. 

Those same factions are as intimately involved in the activities of Silicon Valley, making it no coincidence that, following his first arrest in 2007, Epstein attempted to rebrand as a hi-tech investor and patron of “transhumanist”-related sciences, showing that the interest of his benefactors had moved from sexual blackmail and human trafficking to the electronic forms of blackmail and the trafficking of data. 

Just months before his 2019 arrest, Epstein would brag about having blackmail on prominent Silicon Valley figures and is known to have entertained LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Epstein’s close associate Ghislaine Maxwell had similarly directed her attention at Silicon Valley following Epstein’s first arrest and her sisters, Isabel and Christine, have been intimately involved in Silicon Valley and hi-tech contractors for US intelligence for decades.

Praising Eugenicists for “pushing the frontiers of science”

Aside from the intelligence connections via Silicon Valley and Jeffrey Epstein, Lander has also courted controversy for a controversial toast he led in honor of eugenicist James Watson in 2018. On Watson’s 90^th birthday, Lander praised Watson for “inspiring all of us to push the frontiers of science to benefit humankind.” Watson, though best remembered as the co-discoverer of the DNA double helix structure, was also a notorious eugenicist who stated his belief that people of African descent have genetically inferior intelligence on numerous occasions. Watson first began to retreat from public life in 2007, when he told the BBC that Western government projects in Africa were likely to fail because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really”. 

After offering the toast, Lander was later forced to apologize for his public praise of James Watson. Yet, since his nomination to serve in the “diversity-focused” Biden administration, some former critics of Lander’s praise of Watson have now warmed up to the MIT geneticist, citing the fact that his deputy, Alondra Nelson, is an African American woman.

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