The Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation is a private science foundation known for establishing the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard University with a $30 million gift to the university. The Program for Evolutionary Dynamics is considered the first department of its kind to study the evolution of molecular biology with the sole use of mathematics. It is also one of the first departments to develop mathematical models of how human cancer cells evolve as well as infectious bacteria and viruses such as HIV.
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The Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation is also known for giving one of the largest amounts of funding to individual scientists around the world. Since 2000, the Foundation has given approximately $200 million a year to many notable scientists including Stephen Hawking, Marvin Minsky, Eric Lander, Lawrence Krauss, Lee Smolin, George Church, Ben Goertzel, Kip Thorne, Gregory Benford and numerous Nobel laureates, including, Gerald Edelman, Murray Gell-Mann, Gerard ’t Hooft, David Gross, and Frank Wilczek. Over the years, the Foundation has convened many of these scientists in conferences to discuss the consensus on fundamental science topics such as gravity, global threats to the Earth and language.
Background
The Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation is based in St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. It was established in 2000 by New York financier, science philanthropist, and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the Chairman and CEO of a New York investment firm called the Financial Trust Co. Officially registered as J. Epstein VI Foundation, the "VI" stands for Virgin Islands, where Epstein owns a private island called Little Saint James near St. Thomas. The foundation's board includes Cecile de Jongh, the wife of the Governor of the islands, John de Jongh.
In addition to supporting science and education, Epstein sits on the board of the Mind, Brain and Behavior Committee at Harvard University. He is also actively involved in the Santa Fe Institute, the Theoretical Biology Initiative at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Quantum Gravity Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Epstein is also well acquainted with Harvard's ex-president Larry Summers—the two served together on the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations.
There has been much controversy to the foundation and money given to Havard by Epstein. Many called upon Harvard to return donations after his conviction for using underaged girls for his own sexual pleasure, as well as to gain favor with prominent politicians and businessmen. Many other people and institutions returned donations after Epstein's prosecution for such was made public. However, Harvard refused to do so, or disassociate itself from Epstein.
Program for Evolutionary Dynamics
Founded in 2003, the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (PED) is directed by Martin Nowak, a professor of mathematics and biology at Harvard. In 2012, Martin Nowak and PED post-doctoral students, Benjamin Allen and Ivana Bozic, developed the first mathematical model of how human cancer cells evolve and specifically how they become immune to inhibitor therapy treatment. Their research was conducted from the request of the Pathology and Oncology Department at Johns Hopkins University. The Department was trying to understand how the KRAS gene in colon cancer cells becomes activated after inhibitor drug therapy, making the cells resistant to treatment.
By developing a mathematical model of colon cancer cell growth, Nowak and his team, showed how the KRAS gene is not actually activated or ‘switched on’ from inhibitor drugs but rather a small percentage of colon cancer cells with an already activated KRAS gene are immune from the start and come to dominate as the other cancer cells are destroyed by the inhibitor drug. was critical in changing the approach to inhibitor drug therapy. Instead of applying drugs in sequence to one another in efforts to fight secondary and tertiary resistance, the Pathology and Oncology Department at Johns Hopkins are now exploring the use of a cocktail of inhibitor drugs to capture all colon cancer cell types: those with the activated KRAS gene and those without. The same tailored approach is underway for other cancer types.
In 2010, PED's Ivana Bozic and Martin Nowak co-authored a mathematical study showing that most solid tumors contain 40 to 100 genetic mutations, but that on average only 5 to 15 of those actually drive tumor growth. The findings were essential to the researchers at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere because they demonstrated the importance of isolating only a key minority of mutated tumor cells for effective inhibitor treatment.
In addition to working closely with the PED, the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation supports many other areas of science research, including neuroscience, signal cell intelligence, cancer research, and other diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Multiple Sclerosis and Crohn’s and Colitis disease.
More recently, the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation has backed cutting edge research in Hong Kong and Berlin in the field of artificial intelligence: notably efforts to map and better identify the workings of the human brain.