The Other List

Why Epstein was funding experiments, not just collecting names

Feb 04, 2026

Everyone’s looking at the wrong list.

The flight logs. The visitor records. The names that confirm what people suspected for years about certain islands and certain planes and certain parties where the guest list was curated for maximum leverage.

That’s what everyone’s combing through.

But there’s another list. It’s in the same three million files. It’s not hidden. It’s just less interesting to people who came looking for scandal.

The proposals.

The Edge Foundation was John Brockman’s intellectual salon. Annual gatherings of the world’s most influential scientific minds. Dinner parties where Nobel laureates met tech billionaires. Richard Dawkins. Lawrence Krauss. Steven Pinker. A contact sheet for people who shape the future without ever running for office.

Epstein funded Edge. But Edge wasn’t the operation.

Edge was the talent show.

You host dinners. You watch who’s brilliant. You note who’s ambitious, who’s frustrated by institutional constraints, who talks about what they’d do if funding weren’t an issue. Then you invite the interesting ones somewhere more private.

A jet. An island. A ranch in New Mexico.

The emails in the new files aren’t dinner invitations. They’re pitches.

August 2018. A Bitcoin developer named Bryan Bishop writes to Epstein about “garage biology”. His plan to create the first human designer baby and possibly a human clone within five years. He outlines mouse testing at a lab in Ukraine, amateur human sperm work in Mississippi. He asks for one to three million dollars. He notes that once the first birth happens, “everything changes and the world will never be the same.”

Bishop discusses secrecy requirements. Anonymity about the babies would be essential. Identifying them publicly “would brand the child as a freak for life in the media.”

This wasn’t a grant application to the NIH.

December 2018. Robert Trivers, Harvard evolutionary biologist, writes to Epstein about hormone intervention in children. The subject line is “Trans.” The email discusses blocking testosterone receptors, increasing estrogen production. Trivers notes they’re “pushing the intervention earlier” and mentions identifying “trans tendencies” in children as young as three years old.

“I would be frightened to do that,” Trivers writes. “But who knows?”

December 2015. Epstein emails about designing a pig with non-cloven hoofs to make kosher bacon. Gene editing as intellectual amusement.

These aren’t academic discussions. They’re project updates sent to a man with funding, facilities, and reasons to keep everyone quiet.

The pattern emerges when you stop looking for the salacious details.

Wine and dine to identify the talent. Private invitations sorted who was willing to work outside institutional oversight. The islands and ranches and jets provided venues where proposals could be discussed without record. And the compromising situations that happened in those venues, the ones everyone’s reading about now, those weren’t the product.

They were the insurance policy.

You don’t fund off-books research with people who can walk away.

There’s a body called JASON. Founded in 1960. Thirty-odd scientists, mostly physicists, who advise the Department of Defense on technical matters too complex for generals to evaluate. Nuclear policy. Missile defense. Cybersecurity doctrine.

Freeman Dyson was a founding member. The physicist who imagined structures around stars to harvest infinite energy. Ideas that echo in Elon’s push for multi-planetary expansion.

He attended Edge dinners. He met with Epstein.

The advisory class has always existed. Scientists who brief presidents and then go back to their labs. What the files reveal is a parallel structure. A private JASON. One that worked on projects the official version couldn’t touch, funded by money that didn’t require disclosure, located in jurisdictions that didn’t ask questions.

Ukraine. New Mexico. The Caribbean.

In 1945, the United States imported sixteen hundred German scientists under Operation Paperclip. Rocket engineers. Chemists. Physicians who had conducted experiments in camps. Their expertise was deemed more valuable than their history.

Wolfgang Weyers documented what those scientists did in The Abuse of Man, a history of human experimentation that most medical schools don’t teach. I’ve got a copy on my desk. Over the next few months I’ll be working through it chapter by chapter. The pattern of moving expertise offshore when domestic oversight becomes inconvenient isn’t new.

What's new is the network.

Decentralized, deniable, distributed across jurisdictions that don't ask questions.

Bill Clinton once said there’s a government inside the government, and I don’t control it.

He wasn’t talking about the Deep State the way the media frames it. He was talking about capability that exists outside oversight. People who can fund things that can’t be funded, build things that can’t be authorized, work in places that don’t enforce rules.

The sex is what people will look at. It generates headlines. And it happened.

But the science is what matters. Designer babies. Human cloning. Pediatric hormone experiments. Gene editing. Projects proposed in emails to a financier who had the network to find the talent, the money to fund the work, and the leverage to ensure no one talked.

Three million files dropped. The public is scanning for names. Confirming suspicions about islands and parties.

Look at the emails between scientists and their funder. The feasibility discussions. The location scouting for labs that don’t answer to anyone.

That’s the other list.