Jeffrey Epstein DNA at Harvard involved in new mystery

Megan Molteni reports on discoveries from the frontiers of genomic medicine, neuroscience, and reproductive tech. She joined STAT in 2021 after covering health and science at WIRED. You can reach Megan on Signal at mmolteni.13.

There’s a new mystery involving Jeffrey Epstein and a Harvard genome sequencing project that he participated in.

Somebody appears to have recently altered the Personal Genome Project’s public profile page believed to belong to Epstein to indicate that he provided his consent to join the study on Jan. 31, 2026. That is one day after the Department of Justice released its latest tranche of files on the sex trafficker, and more than six years after he was found dead in a jail cell.

Some of the more than 3 million documents in the DOJ release revealed that Epstein had been a participant in the PGP, led by Harvard Medical School professor George Church, and that as a part of that study, cell lines containing Epstein’s DNA had been created in 2013.