The financier pursued cryptographers to “hack” the genetic code, and develop “new signals intelligence” to understand inter-cellular communication.
In January 2010, Ilya Ponomarev, a member of the Duma—the Russian parliament— helped arrange a visit to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by a group of senior Russian officials. He told a Latvia-based outlet he was in Boston to explore cooperation between Russian and American startups.
Vladislav Surkov, deputy of then-President Dmitry Medvedev, was part of the delegation. At the time, Surkov was seeking to develop the “second leg” of a managed multiparty system to counter-balance Putin’s dominant United Russia Party. After the visit, Surkov asked Ponomarev, a popular member of A Just Russia, the controlled opposition party, to become a “technology transfer” advisor for Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian-Israeli billionaire.
Vekselberg, owner of the conglomerate Renova Group, was in charge of the Skolkovo Innovation Center, dubbed Moscow’s “Silicon Valley,” a high-tech business district subsidized by Russian state-owned enterprises and administered by the non-profit Skolkovo Foundation.
With Ponomarev’s help, Vekselberg established the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, or “Skoltech,” a $300 million research partnership paid by the Skolkovo Foundation to MIT. MIT and Skolkovo share profits and royalties from the partnership, which includes intellectual property related to CRISPR gene-editing technology. Skoltech supported research on RNA-targeting methods using CRISPR, and also owns rights to diagnostic technology based on the same RNA-targeting effector.
Like many of his ultra-wealthy peers, Jeffrey Epstein was fascinated by gene therapy and life-extension technology. He once suggested to news anchor Katie Couric—to her shock and disgust—that he even planned to clone himself. But his interest in genomics was more than a passing fancy; it was an enduring obsession during the final decades of his life. (more...)
Jeffrey Epstein Recruited NSA Codebreakers for Genome “Manhattan Project”
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