Was Jeffrey Epstein Involved in Eugenics & Genetic Engineering?

Jeffrey Epstein was convicted and widely known for sex trafficking and the abuse of minors. But trafficking was not the full extent of his ambitions.

Behind the scenes, Epstein pursued a separate obsession: eugenics.

Multiple reports and firsthand accounts describe Epstein discussing a plan to “seed” the population with his DNA, including claims that he wanted to impregnate up to twenty women at his Zorro Ranch, a remote property in New Mexico.

He reportedly took inspiration from the Repository for Germinal Choice, the notorious 1980s sperm bank that sought genetic material from “exceptional” men, including Nobel laureates.

What Eugenics Project Was Epstein Involved In?

As far as we know, Epstein did not have a formal program with a public name. Instead, he pursued a personal, donor-driven project built around three overlapping goals:

• He wanted to breed a genetic legacy. Epstein spoke openly about impregnating multiple women to propagate his DNA at Zorro Ranch. He also discussed having his head and penis cryogenically preserved. His Virgin Islands entity, the Southern Trust Company, ran DNA-banking operations.
• He bought his way into elite science. Epstein gave at least $6.5 million to Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, funded George Church’s CRISPR research, steered an additional $2 million to Church’s lab from other donors, donated $20,000 to Humanity+ (formerly the World Transhumanist Association), and bankrolled AI researcher Ben Goertzel’s work on artificial general intelligence. He wasn’t just writing checks. He brokered introductions, directed other people’s money, and positioned himself as a gatekeeper.
• He turned dinner parties into eugenics seminars. Attendees of Epstein’s private gatherings describe a consistent pattern: he pushed conversations about genetic differences, intelligence, and human “improvement,” seeking out credentialed participants willing to engage rather than walk away. According to the New York Times, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz said he was appalled after hearing Epstein’s eugenics ideas aired at a Harvard lunch.

What Do His Emails Suggest About Motive?

Epstein’s correspondence suggests this was not casual provocation. He returned repeatedly to the same themes: heredity, gene editing, and the genetics of intelligence. He framed them like a blueprint for social engineering, not scientific questions with ethical constraints. Eugenics wasn’t just something he discussed. It shaped who he funded, what he pushed in conversation, and how he talked about the future.

The DOJ document releases in late 2025 and early 2026 included personal emails that put this pattern on full display:

The Chomsky exchange

In a February 2016 email to linguist Noam Chomsky, Epstein argued for a genetic basis for racial differences in test scores and used that as a springboard for broader genetic editing. Chomsky pushed back. Epstein’s reply was two words: “Genetic altruism,” a phrase that echoes Silicon Valley’s “effective altruism” while repackaging old eugenics thinking.

IQ and DNA fixation

A 2013 email showed Epstein writing approvingly about “IQ tests for children,” noting, “there are enough different types of tests, making the system robust.” In other correspondence, he asked an associate about a DNA test, saying he was looking forward to seeing “how many genes we share.” When someone asked if he had his genome sequenced, he joked about having “two recessive genes that cause hyper fucking.”

Research on transgender people

One of the most disturbing threads involves evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, whom Epstein funded starting in at least 2009 and later described to Chomsky as a scientist he was the “major funder” of. After Trivers thanked him for “extra money and appointment as an advisor to your Foundation,” Epstein responded with a directive: “I want to see your piece on transgender in the bio world.” Two months later, Trivers replied he was “getting to the end of ‘transsexuality.’”

The correspondence between the two on transgender people was explicitly dehumanizing. Trivers wrote about trans women in crude, sexualized terms, reducing them to body parts. In 2018, he called trans men “unhappy and lonely,” using degrading anatomical slurs. In 2019, months before Epstein’s death, Epstein pushed Trivers again to “focus on transgender biology.” Trivers later published co-authored research claiming finger-length ratios could predict gender identity, an approach University of Vienna psychologist Martin Voracek compared to phrenology, calling it “a house of cards built on an unknown and uncertain base.”

Trivers also defended Epstein’s crimes in a 2015 Reuters interview, saying of his underage victims, “By the time they’re 14 or 15, they’re like grown women were 60 years ago, so I don’t see these acts as so heinous.”

Epstein’s own funding philosophy. In a 2017 Science magazine interview, Epstein dismissed the Gates Foundation for not searching for “smart people” and described himself as interested in “the rarefied peaks” and “new theories of biology.”

How Far Did It Get?

The available record supports a clear conclusion: Epstein built an ecosystem around genetics and bioengineering and pursued ambitious plans. But he never realized those ambitions, and there is no evidence that, before his death, he actually cryogenically preserved his head or penis.