You took something this morning.
A pill, a capsule. Down the throat with a little water. Maybe a prescription your doctor renewed without much conversation. Just a mutual trust in science. Maybe a supplement you bought because an influencer on your FYP said it worked. There was a study. You swallowed it and moved on with your day.
Here is the question no one wants you to ask: Who funded that study? Who reviewed it? Who published the journal it appeared in? And who profits, every morning, when you swallow it?
Three million pages of federal documents were released by the Department of Justice on January 30, 2026. They detail how Jeffrey Epstein did not merely donate to elite universities. He funded specific research programs at Harvard and MIT. He maintained his own office inside a Harvard laboratory. He sat on the advisory boards of leading scientific publications. He corresponded directly with researchers about the direction of their work, reviewed page proofs before publication, and kept a personal list of nearly thirty top scientists he cultivated like assets.
His partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, came from a family that had already reshaped the infrastructure of science from the inside. Her father, Robert Maxwell, built Pergamon Press into one of the most powerful scientific publishing houses in the world, controlling hundreds of academic journals and producing textbooks used in universities globally before selling the empire to Elsevier for nearly eight hundred million dollars. The Maxwell family did not just fund science. They built the gates through which science had to pass to be called legitimate.
The money was not incidental to the research. It was embedded in the machinery. In the journals. In the textbooks. In the peer review process itself.
Television networks worldwide have covered this angle of the larger story at length. The question being asked internationally is blunt:
Can American science be trusted?
But this question did not start with Epstein.
Purdue Pharma funded studies designed to minimize the addiction risk of OxyContin. Physicians prescribed based on that science. Medical schools taught it. Peer reviewed journals published it. Every credentialed checkpoint in the system approved it. And over two decades, more than half a million Americans died.
The system did not catch the distortion. The system was the distortion.
At the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, a freelance data analyst in Wales flagged manipulated images and duplicated data across dozens of studies authored by four senior researchers, including the institute's president and CEO. The work had appeared in Nature, Cell, and Science. Dana-Farber retracted papers, corrected others, and by December 2025 quietly settled a False Claims Act lawsuit for fifteen million dollars, acknowledging that researchers had used data that was "misrepresented and/or duplicated" in support of taxpayer funded NIH grant applications.
It took a blogger to catch what the entire peer review system missed.
The opioid dead were invisible for years. The fabricated cancer data barely registered. But finally, the moment science's funding crisis collided with the abuse of children, the architecture became visible to everyone.
This is not one scandal. It is a pattern. And the pattern has your fingerprints on it. Every pill bottle in your cabinet. Every monthly refill. Every study you never read but trusted anyway.
The data confirm it. Over the past decade, independent researchers attempting to reproduce landmark published studies have watched the results collapse. In psychology, fewer than forty percent of one hundred major studies replicated successfully. In preclinical cancer research, eleven percent. A Nature survey of more than fifteen hundred scientists found that over seventy percent had tried and failed to reproduce another researcher's work. More than half could not reproduce their own.
The reason is structural. When careers depend on publishing novel yet commercial results, and funding depends on careers, and journals depend on novelty, the entire ecosystem optimizes for producing findings. Not truth. A negative result does not get published. A replication study does not get funded. A correction does not advance a career. The incentives all point one direction: forward, new, more. Whether it holds up is someone else's problem.
Usually no one's.
This is not a broken system. This is capitalism functioning inside science exactly as capitalism functions everywhere else.
A pharmaceutical company funds a study on its own drug. The study is not designed to discover. It is designed to confirm. A product already built, looking for the science to bless it.
Universities follow the same logic. Departments survive on grants. Faculty salaries depend on them. Graduate students eat because of them. Donors write checks with expectations. The money does not always corrupt the conclusion. But at minimum it shapes the frame. And the frame determines what is seen.
Peer review, often called science's immune system, operates inside the same economy. The reviewers compete for the same grants. They build careers inside the same paradigms. The journals sit within prestige hierarchies built, in many cases, by the very publishing empires now under scrutiny. Consensus stops being discovered. It gets manufactured.
And in the life sciences especially, the dominant logic is not cure. It is continuity. The patient becomes a customer. The customer becomes a subscriber. The subscriber becomes a lifetime revenue stream.
That handful of pills you took this morning, your stack of supplements and prescriptions, is not an accident. It is not a cure. It is a business model. And you are a customer, attempting to buy back your own health.
I am a physicist. A mathematician. Sometimes a biochemist. Sometimes a geneticist. Always a global public health architect. Harvard masters and doctorate. Taught there. Researched there. Left. Former Harvard professors and colleagues are prominent in the current news cycle. Harvard has asked me back in various capacities since I left. I keep my affiliation capped at sometimes wearing an old Harvard T-shirt to bed.
I founded the Institute of DNA Science as an independent research institute because I watched the system from inside and understood what it was optimized for. Not truth. Not unbiased rigor and breakthrough thinking. Not the optimization of health for all. Revenue. Always revenue. That’s not a condemnation. It’s an observation. My worldview doesn’t align with revenue-centered science. So I took my career elsewhere.
At the Institute of DNA Science, independence is not branding. It is infrastructure. We are privately held and funded through revenue generated by our biotech partner, which is also privately held and independent. No NIH grants. No donor entanglement. No academic dependency. No shareholders. No institutional benefactors expecting alignment with their portfolio.
Our mission is simple enough to fit on a cocktail napkin: pursue truth, expand knowledge, and optimize human health. Under one conviction that separates us from nearly every other entity in this space.
Health is not a subscription service. It is your birthright.
That is not a business model. It is a moral ethos. Venture capitalists hate it. Which tells us we are thinking in the right direction.
And that conviction changes what we are allowed to find.
We concluded a study of twenty thousand participants across five continents at twenty-three locations over four years. What emerged is that longevity is not something you purchase. It is innate. Locked inside your DNA. Waiting to be activated. And the activation is fast, simple, and most importantly, free.
Not a pill. Not a gadget. Not a proprietary diet. Not a branded exercise protocol. Not another leg on the existing table of longevity science with its global revenue north of a trillion dollars annually.
It dismantles the table.
This is where independence becomes dangerous. Not to people. To markets. Our findings do not generate a product to sell. No one profits from them. Not even us. And because we do not answer to a board optimizing for returns, we can publish those results and stand behind them.
But when science reveals something free, every institution built on selling the alternative has a reason to discredit it. The pushback never comes from the data. It comes from the balance sheets.
Independent science is structurally capable of finding answers that funded science is structurally incapable of tolerating. Because funded science requires economic return in some form, at some time. Independent science does not.
And yet independence has a price. Not to you. To the people doing the science.
Scientists who work outside institutional affiliation get questioned differently. Not more rigorously. Differently. With suspicion instead of curiosity.
I regularly find myself defending the validity of a twenty thousand person, multi-continental, four year study that would never be questioned if Harvard's name were on the letterhead. Even if the study were smaller. Even if the methodology were narrower. Even if the results were less significant.
And they would be. Because the study a university would fund would likely cover one to five locations, not twenty-three across five continents. A few dozen participants. Maybe a hundred. Not twenty thousand. It would last six weeks, or nine. Not four years. Every one of those constraints means results that are less tested, less verified, less applicable to a broad population.
The better, stronger, more solid results get questioned more ferociously. Not because they lack rigor. Because they disturb a business model. The questions are not about the science. They are about protecting a system. A system that sells you back your health and needs you to keep buying.
The institutional brand functions as a placeholder for trust. The name does the work the data should do. Remove the name, and every finding requires defending from the ground up. Not because the science is weaker. It is stronger. But because credibility in American science is not built on evidence. It is built on affiliation. And affiliation is built on commerce. Feeding a system that shelters its own and marginalizes anyone whose findings threaten a narrative worth trillions in global business.
Trust in science is not distributed based on rigor. It is distributed based on proximity to power.
Your health is caught in the middle.
At the Institute of DNA Science, the foundation is mathematics. Not as a tool. As a first language. Mathematics is the grammar underneath every scientific field. A scientist fluent in that grammar moves between biology and physics and chemistry and computational modeling the way a Romance language speaker moves between Spanish and Italian and French. The syntax shifts. The structure holds.
We hire for mathematical depth and creative range. Not pedigree. When a biological phenomenon demands a physics model, we build one. When the genetics data outgrow an existing computational framework, we design a new one. No departmental boundaries. No grant categories. No invisible fences around thought.
We pivot when the data demand it. If a stronger hypothesis surfaces mid-study, we follow it. We do not drag a project to a finish line to satisfy a funder's terms. A negative result is not failure. It is information.
Our team spans varied backgrounds, races, educational paths, and intellectual temperaments. Many started in public schools and state universities before Ivy League graduate work. We hire people who do not think in straight lines. Because the most important answers live at the borders between fields, in spaces no single discipline owns.
This is how breakthrough science actually works. Not like a factory. Like a studio.
So what has name-brand science produced?
Half a million dead from opioids blessed by industry funded research. Fabricated cancer studies in the world's most elite journals. A convicted sex offender with his own office in a Harvard lab. The Maxwell family's publishing empire woven into the architecture of peer review. Three million pages of federal documents confirming what institutions denied for years. Over seventy percent of scientists unable to reproduce each other's work.
Not because science is broken. Because science has a business model. And the business model is working. On you.
The skepticism surrounding American science right now is not cynicism. It is clarity. And it should not be dismissed.
If funding shapes inquiry, say so.
If the people who built the publishing infrastructure are the same people in the federal files, name them.
And if independence is possible, structurally, financially, operationally possible, protect it. Because a laboratory can still be a place where truth is pursued because it is true. Not because it is marketable. Not because a donor expects it. Not because a convicted child predator funded it.
Because the truth can optimize your health. Because your health is your birthright. And because right now, you deserve to know who is working for you and who is only billing you for it.
We are doing this work daily at the Institute of DNA Science.
Quietly. Rigorously. Without apology.
What we are discovering will help you live longer, live better, and keep what was always yours. You cannot put a price on that. And neither will we.
