The Science Timeline:
institutions, Africa, and the federal record

The Miami Herald’s analysis of public filings from three Epstein charities puts a floor under the funding of Brockman’s salon. The figure ends in 2005 — three years before the conviction — and Brockman’s own filings show Epstein funding the TED dinners for years afterward.

John Brockman begins convening his annual literary dinners during the TED Conference. Per his own tax filings, they were for years after the conviction almost entirely funded by Jeffrey Epstein. Axios later assessed that the Edge Foundation “appears to have been funded largely by and for the benefit of” him.

All three are Brockman clients, and all three travelled to that conference on Epstein’s private jet. Dawkins on militant atheism; Dennett on consciousness the following year; Pinker at TEDGlobal 2005 and TED2007. Pinker says he boarded only because of Brockman. No allegation of wrongdoing established against any of them. The speaker list →

An Edge.org photograph shows Brockman with Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, Katinka Matson and Richard Dawkins travelling to TED. An earlier caption, since altered, stated they were travelling with Epstein.

$100,000 to Marvin Minsky, founder of the field of artificial intelligence. Six years before the conviction.

“Health and the human mind.” Minsky had received $100,000 from Epstein the previous year — the first documented Epstein gift to an MIT figure — and would later be described as visiting him in jail.

Creates the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics under Martin Nowak, plus a leased research suite at 1 Brattle Square. The largest single concentration of his academic money anywhere.

Detectives open the investigation that survivors and local police, not any institution, would drive forward.

“Beauty and truth in physics.” Gell-Mann co-founded the Santa Fe Institute, Epstein’s earliest documented point of entry into science, via donations in the early 1990s. No allegation of wrongdoing established.

President Drew Faust is briefed and rules Harvard will take no further Epstein money. The decision held. In the same year, Lawrence Krauss founds the Origins Project at Arizona State.

Epstein pleads guilty under the Florida non-prosecution agreement and registers as a sex offender.

EFTA00763822. Months after Epstein’s release, Krauss proposes he join the ASU Origins board, that meetings be held in St. Thomas, and that they use the ASU Foundation “to funnel money in private ways to do whatever we want.”

Gates presents the emissions equation CO₂ = P × S × E × C and says: “The world today has 6.8 billion people… if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent.” The single most-clipped sentence of his career. Full passage and context →

The densest cluster of Uganda references in the files, 30 September to 11 October.

Sultan bin Sulayem introduces Epstein to Karim Wade in Paris — son of Senegal’s president. The campaign to free him would cost Epstein $1,050,000+ over six years.

First donation from Epstein’s Enhanced Education foundation to the Origins Project. Every ASU dollar post-dates the conviction.

Gates meets Epstein on numerous occasions from this year — three years after the guilty plea. At least three at the Manhattan townhouse.

Tells the Daily Beast that the women around Epstein were “not as young as the ones that were claimed” — then forwards the reporter’s correspondence to Epstein: “you are my friend.”

Epstein pitches bank executives a multibillion-dollar charitable fund built on Gates’s money. An insider memo records his intent to “leverage the resources of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.” It was never created.

To the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative. Melinda separately commits $1.5bn over five years to women’s and children’s health.

Epstein meets President Ouattara in a ministerial suite booked by the president’s niece — having asked in advance to see “very pretty girls.”

Bill and Melinda meet Epstein together; she tells Bill she is uncomfortable. A Paris meeting follows in June. In July Epstein writes two emails to himself claiming he facilitated encounters for Gates — never sent; Gates calls them “absolutely absurd and completely false.”

Bin Sulayem emails Epstein from Uhuru Kenyatta’s inauguration. Ehud Barak begins a run of 30+ visits to Epstein’s properties, through 2017.

“Want to innovate? Become a now-ist.” By this point Ito had taken $1.7 million from Epstein, mostly into his own venture funds, and the MIT Media Lab had received the Gates and Black gifts Epstein claimed credit for.

$2 million from Gates and $5 million from Leon Black reach the Media Lab. Epstein claims credit for both. Gates denies any connection; MIT’s review found no evidence either was made at his behest.

$2 million from Leon and Debra Black to the Origins Project, including a $2m irrevocable pledge (EFTA00584059). One ASU record lists Epstein’s employer as “Leon D. Black, Enhanced Education.”

Israel and Côte d’Ivoire sign a security cooperation agreement. Epstein’s attorney conducts due diligence on a 727 sale into Uganda. Barak-linked surveillance contracts in Nigeria run from this year to 2019.

The fifth-anniversary Great Debate, on whether human violence is rooted in biology — with Steven Pinker. Epstein is photographed at the fundraising dinner with Krauss and Pinker.

Notice of Award for R01AI110964, “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” PI Peter Daszak, EcoHealth Alliance; co-investigators include Zhengli Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. ~$500,000 a year for five years; the WIV subaward totalled $598,611 (2014–2019). The Gates Foundation separately granted EcoHealth $1.5m in August 2020 — see that entry.

A “Q” access authorisation is issued under the Atomic Energy Act and covers Restricted Data — the Department of Energy’s highest classification level. Gates’s was granted reciprocally, meaning another federal agency vetted him first and the DOE honoured that vetting. It ran until 6 December 2021. Confirmed by a DOE letter entered into the Senate record by Sen. Rand Paul on 29 July 2026. The letter does not name the originating agency, and does not state why the clearance was granted. Gates held no government position. He founded and chairs TerraPower, which works with DOE national laboratories — the letter does not cite this or any other reason.

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announces a deliberative process and funding pause on gain-of-function studies. NIH later concluded R01AI110964 was not subject to it.

Gates’s final direct email to Epstein in the DOJ documents.

Epstein emails the Media Lab’s director proposing to approach Robert Mugabe with a sovereign currency scheme, calling the country a “great petri dish.” The MIT Digital Currency Initiative launches the same year, under the same director.

Twenty-to-thirty-year port concessions begin across Kenya, Tanzania, Senegal, Angola, Mozambique and the DRC.

Prompted by the 2014 Ebola outbreak. Gates argues the world has “invested a huge amount in nuclear deterrence, but… very little in a system to stop an epidemic,” and calls for health systems in poor countries, a medical reserve corps, pairing medical staff with military logistics, “germ games” rather than war games, and advanced vaccine and diagnostic R&D. “There’s no need to panic… but we need to get going.” Full talk →

Gates has stopped engaging directly. Contact runs through Boris Nikolic: “you can tell your boy that i still hear from mila. i put her through computer school.”

On 24 June, after six years and over a million dollars.

EFTA00318013 records an argument about the existence of God with Ehud Barak and Lawrence Krauss, and “a new side of Martin Nowak” — a former prime minister, an ASU physicist and a Harvard professor, at the property of a registered sex offender.

A visiting Cambridge researcher records Epstein appearing at an ASU Origins event accompanied by two young women he described as “East European-looking.” Nine years post-conviction.

BuzzFeed publishes sexual misconduct allegations; ASU places him on leave. Nothing to do with Epstein.

Krauss, under investigation, corresponds with Epstein, who writes: “My friends in the White House HATE the title ix c--ts… Ironic but he might be your out.” Krauss: “Ironic indeed! But I will take it.”

Epstein’s final documented visit to Office 610 — one of 40+ since 2010, routinely accompanied by young women in their twenties. The visits stopped only after researchers inside the programme complained.

Epstein introduces urologist Harry Fisch to Boris Nikolic, seeking an introduction to the Gates Foundation for grants to distribute female condoms across Africa — against a three-million-unit shortfall in Uganda. No document establishes what followed.

Bin Sulayem writes about a DP World signing in Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, then onward to Uganda and Tanzania.

Epstein is arrested on 6 July and dies on 10 August. MIT and Harvard open reviews; Joi Ito resigns in September.

MIT publishes in January; Harvard’s Lopez report in May documents Office 610, the 40+ visits, the fellowship and the $9.1m.

A $1.5 million grant over three years, for technical assistance supporting a national “One Health” platform with India’s Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying. The foundation confirmed the grant and later said it was transitioning the work to an India-based partner. EcoHealth’s other funding in this period included roughly $16m a year in federal grants and just under $39m from the Pentagon between 2013 and 2020.

The WHO certification, after decades of Gavi and foundation-funded eradication work.

Harvard places him on paid administrative leave on the findings of the 2020 report.

After 27 years. Melinda French Gates cited the Epstein relationship as a contributing factor.

The WHO and Medicines Patent Pool programme begins, with its hub at Afrigen in Cape Town. Two years after Epstein’s death.

Gates’s DOE Q access authorisation is terminated on 6 December, after seven years.

A modular mRNA manufacturing facility opens in Rwanda, later backed by CEPI and EC/EIB financing.

HHS suspends all federal funding to EcoHealth Alliance and proposes debarment of the organisation and Peter Daszak, following the House Select Subcommittee report. Daszak had told the subcommittee EcoHealth received roughly $16 million a year in government grants.

A five-year prohibition on federal funding to EcoHealth Alliance takes effect. Independent analysis had earlier documented just under $39 million in Pentagon funding to the organisation between 2013 and 2020 — the overwhelming majority of its money was federal, not philanthropic.

The largest philanthropic commitment in modern history. Over $100bn given in the first 25 years.

A Phase 1 mRNA HIV vaccine trial begins in Soweto — 96 participants across six South African centres, funded by the Gates Foundation via CAVD.

3.5 million pages. The Nikolic correspondence, the Krauss emails, the Africa files and the Harvard material enter the public record.

Harvard places him on leave a second time. Lawrence Summers takes indefinite leave and announces retirement.

He says he “should never have met with Epstein in the first place,” but “never witnessed nor had any indication that Epstein was engaged in ongoing criminal conduct.”

Sen. Rand Paul enters the letter confirming the 2014–2021 Q clearance into the Senate record, during a hearing at which Anthony Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment.