UCSD professors wanted money to research telepathy. They turned to Jeffrey Epstein.

By the time Jeffrey Epstein wrote a $50,000 check to fund unusual research into the paranormal by UC San Diego scientists, they had already known they could turn to him for money.

Back in 2010, a fundraising request for the university’s Center for Brain and Cognition, led by renowned neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, had been sent to Epstein — by then already a convicted sex criminal. 

Seven years later, the financier emerged again as a potential benefactor for Ramachandran and high-profile colleagues at UCSD.

In 2017, Ramachandran and two other UCSD professors, Paul Mills and Deepak Chopra, the famous New Age author, were launching a study of autistic children thought to be savants. They had a particular interest in one provocative claim — that some might have telepathic abilities. 

“I don’t have a problem with my lab being funded by Epstein,” Ramachandran wrote to Chopra in September 2017, in an email first reported by The Guardian, UCSD’s student newspaper.

The initial funding request and later discussions were revealed in emails that are among a tranche of millions of documents connected to Epstein that were released in January by the U.S. Department of Justice. 

Among the files that have drawn attention are thousands of messages Epstein and Chopra exchanged, including ones discussing sex, “girls,” prior allegations that had been made against Epstein and his arrangements to bring “cheerleaders” to events Chopra was attending. 

But their correspondence in the files also demonstrates how those two men coordinated some of Chopra’s work at UCSD, and pulled other UCSD scientists into Epstein’s orbit.

In a February social media post, Chopra, still an unpaid UCSD faculty member, characterized his relationship with Epstein as “limited and unrelated to abusive activity.” 

“Some past email exchanges have surfaced that reflect poor judgment in tone. I regret that and understand how they read today, given what was publicly known at the time,” he added.

Aaron Marion, a spokesperson for Chopra, said the $50,000 check was returned. 

When asked for a record of the refund, Marion said he could not provide one. He declined further comment.

Ramachandran, who joined UCSD as a professor in 1983 and is now retired, did not respond to requests for comment.

Mills, who does not appear in any of the emails to have communicated with or about Epstein, said he was unaware of Epstein’s involvement until he was contacted by a reporter. He called the revelation “utterly disturbing.”

UCSD spokesperson Laura Margoni said the university is aware of Epstein’s ties to faculty and that the matter was under review.

The university did not answer further questions about that review, including its extent and focus, who was conducting it and whether its findings would be released publicly.

“The campus does not support fundraising from convicted sex offenders,” Margoni said. 

“We have reviewed our records and are able to confirm that we do not have any record of a gift from Jeffrey Epstein or his foundation, the Gratitude Foundation, to UC San Diego,” Margoni said.

Chopra’s contract with UCSD ends in June, and he has no active responsibilities before then, she added.

In the weeks since the latest release of files by the Justice Department, revelations about Epstein’s relationships with highly regarded academics like those at UCSD have rocked the world of higher education.

The emails show faculty at some of the country’s most prestigious institutions — Harvard, Yale, Duke, Stanford, UCLA and more — cultivating personal and financial relationships with Epstein, many years after his 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor in Florida.

Some of those scientists were pursuing money for research, institutes and conferences. Others veered into crass and lurid conversations about sex and young women. Chopra was one of them.

Those communications with Epstein have already had professional consequences for some. 

In recent weeks, Larry Summers, the star economist and former Treasury secretary, resigned from Harvard over his relationship with the late financier. At Duke, officials reportedly closed three centers overseen by business professor Dan Ariely over his ties to Epstein. 

In other released emails, Epstein can be seen trying to court renowned scientists, some of them unsuccessfully. Those included J. Craig Venter, the geneticist and UCSD alum famous for his role in mapping the human genome. 

Epstein tried to arrange meetings with Venter through former Arizona State University professor Lawrence Krauss, inviting Venter to his notorious island in the U.S. Virgin Islands in 2010, the emails show.

There is no indication in the files that Venter ever met or communicated with Epstein.

In an interview, Venter said Epstein had been trying to establish a relationship with him since before his 2008 conviction. He said they had met once, at a TED conference in Monterey, though he could not recall the year.

Epstein wanted to manage Venter’s personal finances, and Venter recalled walking away from the interaction thinking, “‘I wouldn’t want this guy holding my wallet, let alone my bank account.’ My sleaze radar went off really fast.”

“Everything in science comes down to a researcher’s personal ethics,” Venter added. “If they want to know (about a person), it is easy to find out about them on the internet. Nobody has an excuse not to know.”

‘Utterly disturbing’

Since Jeffrey Epstein’s 2019 death in a Manhattan jail cell, information has continued to surface about his interest in science.

For years, Epstein funded research into topics ranging from artificial intelligence to physics. He cultivated a circle of prominent scientists. He also showed an intense interest in eugenics, and reportedly entertained the idea of seeding the human race with his own DNA. 

But at UCSD, emails show Epstein’s ties to the university centered on a milieu of faculty known for their interest in the study of human consciousness and unexplained phenomena of the brain. 

Throughout the late 2010s, the faculty member Epstein kept in touch with the most was Chopra, according to the emails. 

A doctor and pivotal figure in the New Age movement, Chopra has long advocated for yoga, meditation and alternative medicine, and suggested one can achieve perfect health with the right mindset.

In 2016, UCSD gave Chopra a voluntary, unpaid clinical professor position in its Department of Family Medicine and Public Health. 

While a professor at the university, the emails show Chopra repeatedly discussed with Epstein an apparent shared interest in what they regarded as telepathy in autistic children. 

That interest bled over into Chopra’s work at UCSD. 

In 2017, Chopra began collaborating with Paul Mills — another professor in the department — to study whether autistic children might possess telepathic abilities, the emails released by the Justice Department show. 

UCSD declined to weigh in on the specifics of the telepathy research and said it “does not dictate what types or trajectories of research an investigator follows.” 

In an interview with The San Diego Union-Tribune, Mills said the research consisted of a pilot study involving a boy of about 12 and his mother at their home in New Jersey. 

Helping with that study, he said, was a neuroscientist named Diane Hennacy Powell.

Mills recalled that in their 2017 experiment, he gave the child’s mother index cards printed with random numbers, and as she read them to herself out of view of her son, he began typing them.

Mills, who retired more than three years ago after 33 years at the university, called the outcome “remarkable” and “against the grain of accepted models of mind and consciousness.” 

He said the experiment was videotaped but that he no longer had access to the recording.

“I fully realize the concept of telepathy is utterly foreign and inconsistent with the Western, materialistic model of the brain and mind, yet I was very willing to study it to see what the truth of the matter might be,” Mills said.

In recent years, such claims about autistic children’s abilities have become popularized by “The Telepathy Tapes,” a 2024 podcast that explored cases of autistic children who it suggests have telepathic abilities. Much of it followed the research of Powell.

Critics point out that such claims sometimes rely on the use of discredited communication methods for non-speaking people. Other researchers focused on autism caution deep skepticism about claims of telepathy. 

“There is a disturbing amount of pseudoscience in the world of autism, of which the bizarre claims regarding telepathy are but one example amongst many,” said Ari Ne’eman, a health policy professor at Harvard and a disability rights advocate.

“Needless to say, autistic people are not telepathic,” Ne’eman added.

Mills defended his research, which he acknowledged some university colleagues might not support. He said it offered “insight into the gifts some people have that are not readily understood by Western science.”

After Mills conducted the pilot study, he said he drafted a proposal for a broader project to test his hypothesis of telepathy in autistic children — a proposal Chopra eventually shared with Epstein, the released emails show.

Mills, who also worked as a paid research director for Chopra’s Carlsbad-based foundation, said he didn’t know about the links between Chopra and Epstein. 

“Frankly, this is utterly disturbing to me,” Mills said. “I didn’t even know who Epstein was until he appeared in the news cycle a couple of years ago.” 

In an email from August 2017, staff at Chopra’s company told Mills that Chopra had found “a person who is very interested in funding” telepathy research and that the unnamed person wanted another faculty member — Ramachandran — to be part of the research. 

By then, Chopra and Ramachandran had been in talks to study autistic children and had drafted a budget and protocols for the research. 

Chopra regularly forwarded his emails with Ramachandran to Epstein, keeping him updated, the released documents show. 

During their planning, Chopra and Ramachandran arranged for two young autistic boys, ages 6 and 8, to participate in the research with their mothers present, the emails show. 

Two days after the younger boy’s mother scheduled a visit, Epstein wrote a $50,000 check for research, according to a scanned copy of the check released along with emails by the Justice Department. 

Epstein first planned to write the check out to the University of California. But Chopra urged him to make it out to Chopra’s foundation, the emails show.

Other released emails show Ramachandran did not want to get the university involved in the research, writing to Chopra that trying to get funding from the university “might get mired in bureaucracy.”

‘A mother was given some hope’

Carolyn Fok, who is from the Bay Area, said she did not know about Epstein’s involvement when she agreed to bring her son to Ramachandran’s office at UCSD. 

The boy had shown exceptional skills with numbers at a young age, before even being formally introduced to mathematics. She said she had shared this with Chopra after meeting him at a party in 2017. 

Fok said the meeting with her son took place in Ramachandran’s office and involved her son being asked to pick prime numbers out of a larger series of numbers. Telepathy was not part of it, she said. 

“A mother was given some hope here to find out more about their child,” Fok said, adding that the study struck her as very professional and legitimate. 

In an interview, the boy recalled liking Ramachandran but feeling pressure about performing well on the exercises.

His mother hopes Epstein’s role in the research doesn’t “turn the clock back” on the study of autistic children with exceptional abilities. 

“My hope is that people go — yeah, Epstein is bad, but the research is good,” Fok added.  

Her son was not the only child they intended to study. The emails show Chopra and Ramachandran had identified at least two other children whom they planned to test.  

Powell had identified one of the children, a boy from San Diego, who she had seen demonstrate what she considered to be telepathic abilities, emails show.

Nyx Sanguino, the child’s mother, said in an interview that Ramachandran’s testing on her son also involved mathematics and numbers. 

“I’m speechless,” Sanguino said of Epstein’s role in funding the research. She said she found Ramachandran to be kind and professional in their interactions. 

“It’s unfortunate that we’re connected to the situation,” she added. 

To conduct research on human subjects, researchers must first seek approval from their university’s institutional review board, an ethics panel set up to protect those subjects.

UCSD has no record of the autism research going before its IRB, Margoni said. Ramachandran did not respond to questions about whether he submitted such research to the board.

Kristen Bottema-Beutel, a professor at Boston College focused on autism research, questioned Epstein’s motivations in supporting the research, noting his long-documented interest in eugenics.

“I don’t think Epstein was interested in understanding disabled people,” Bottema-Beutel said. “There are many conceptualizations of disability where the only way it’s worth thinking about people with disabilities at all is if we fetishize them and say that they have these magical properties.”

UC Riverside professor Steve Brint, who studies fundraising in higher education, noted how research seeking money from private individuals like Epstein does not face the same scientific scrutiny as research funded by government agencies like the National Institutes of Health. 

“At NIH or any of the federal agencies, you have peer review,” Brint said. “The people reading these proposals — they’re experts in the field. They know where the current science is and what the next questions might be.”

The same isn’t necessarily true for private funding, he added — which for certain research can make private support more necessary.

“For an offbeat topic like telepathy, it’s very unlikely to get a hearing at those agencies,” Brint said. “If you’re interested in that, you’re probably going to have to find a private donor who has an interest in it.”

‘It does seem diabolical now’

Epstein’s funding of UCSD research came months after he had come to San Diego to attend a conference led in part by UCSD and members of its faculty. 

In June 2017, the Science of Consciousness conference took place at the Hyatt Regency La Jolla. It featured talks and panel discussions from six UCSD faculty members, among them Chopra and Ramachandran. 

Epstein gave $50,000 to fund the event, the emails show, following a solicitation from Stuart Hameroff, who led the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona.

Epstein wrote the check out to the University of Arizona Foundation, the emails show.

The event’s other organizers included Dr. Erik Viirre, a UCSD neurology professor.

Days later, Viirre emailed Epstein seeking money for research. He said he wanted to study whether human eyes emit “coded photons.” If he could confirm they do, it would “change human history,” Viirre said.

Viirre sent Epstein documents detailing a budget for his research and how he would conduct a proposed experiment. The two men set up a time to chat over Skype, the emails show. 

“Thank you for your interest and support,” Viirre wrote to Epstein. “I will be happy to meet with you regarding the plan.” 

The emails don’t show whether Viirre secured funding from Epstein, though the UCSD professor twice followed up with Epstein about funding over email and stressed that he wanted the research to be separate from the university. 

Last year, Viirre published a conference paper on the subject of photon emissions from eyes.  

Viirre did not respond to the Union-Tribune’s emails with questions and requests for comment. 

In an interview, Hameroff, who organized the La Jolla conference, expressed regret about his associations with Epstein. 

Hameroff acknowledged he had known about Epstein’s criminal history and reputation when he solicited money from him for the conference in 2017. 

“I think (Epstein) was learning as much as he could about ways to manipulate people: biology, consciousness control, everything,” Hameroff said. “He associated with a lot of bright people. It does seem diabolical now.”