Actually I think most people would not jump at the opportunity to do science if they knew that their source of funding was a 55 year-old man who had been accused of raping girls as young as 12 years of age, and that the reason why the accused was funding their research was because he was trying to buy special treatment from the criminal justice system.
As many of us already know, three triplets from France were allegedly "overnighted" to Mr. Epstein as a "birthday present" on his island in the Caribbean, where they were forced to perform oral sex on Mr. Epstein before being sent back home the next day, with the excuse being that the three girls were from a poor area of France whose parents desperately needed the money.
There are some out there, including Epstein himself in one of his last interviews with the press, who claim that pedophiles are the next "oppressed sexual minority" that needs to be liberated, comparing their plight to that of homosexuals in decades past.
The liberation that they seek, supported by ex-MIT luminaries like Richard Stallman, is nothing short of a redefinition of the legal notion of "consent."
As Epstein's longtime friend and Harvard law professor Allen Dershowitz argues to justify the "sweetheart deal" that he obtained for Mr. Epstein from US attorney Alex Acosta, if a 14 year-old is old enough to consent to an abortion after being raped, she must have also been old enough to consent to the statutory rape.
And so if you're from that camp, maybe taking money from Epstein is no big deal. It certainly wasn't for folks like Seth Lloyd, Joi Ito, Marvin Minsky, Steven Pinker, Stephen Kosslyn, Benedict Gross, Martin Nowak, Larry Summers, Larry Summers' wife, and countless others. Some even sent the convicted child rapist personally signed thank-you notes like MIT president Rafael Reif.
I know that I would not have taken his money, as well as most of my colleagues who took very unpleasant jobs in industry because they could not obtain funding the "old-fashioned way," which is by earning it through applying for primarily government-funded research grants that are subject to a peer-review process.
This is not to say that all of the research that government is funding is worth taxpayer money, or that there is enough money to fund the work that really needs to get done, for example in the medical domain.
My suggestion to Mr. Reif though is very simple: instead of taking money from convicted child rapists, why not try spending the billions that your university already receives from taxpayers more responsibly, especially at places like MIT Lincoln Laboratory, which he should know a thing or two about since he became president of MIT for his role in the cover-up of missile defense research fraud at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, which some observers believe led Susan Hockfield to unexpectedly resign from her position as president of MIT when the university was forced to enter into a settlement agreement with MIT Prof. Postol under the threat of facing potential criminal obstruction of justice charges, the terms of which are still sealed to this day.