Epstein paid for novel genetic testing in apparent effort to explore extending life, new emails show

Late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is seen in this image from the U.S. Justice Department’s file of Epstein, released by the House Oversight Committee Democrats Washington, D.C., on December 18, 2025.
House Oversight Committee Democrats/Reuters

Convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein paid for genetic testing in an apparent bid to harness his own genetic material for regenerative medicine – which is aimed at repairing the body by developing new tissues and organs as the old ones wear out – according to newly released emails in the Epstein files.

Several years after Epstein was initially convicted on prostitution-related charges in 2008, he paid for novel tests from a doctor at one of America’s preeminent hospitals and explored creating stem cells central to immunity and healing.

The researcher, Joseph Thakuria, was at the time a senior doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston and affiliated with a large-scale genomic studies project at Harvard Medical School.

In a statement to CNN, Thakuria said Epstein was also enrolled in the Harvard Personal Genome Project, a massive public global database of genetic information from volunteers for scientists and researchers to learn more about traits and genes.

Thakuria has not been publicly linked to Epstein before and is not accused of any wrongdoing.

A Harvard representative said MGH is an affiliate of Harvard, but Thakuria was not directly employed by Harvard or the Wyss Institute, which oversees the Personal Genome Project. MGH has no record of approving Thakuria for studies described in the Epstein emails.

Thakuria left the hospital in 2022, an MGH spokesperson said.

Among the documents in the Epstein files released by the Justice Department is a proposal that Thakuria sent Epstein in February 2014, appealing to him to fund a private project that would sequence his patients’ genomes to learn about genetic drivers for their diseases. In the proposal, he also raises options for genetic investigations specifically for Epstein.

A few months later, in June, Thakuria sent Epstein an extensive invoice for a range of projects that included an initial $2,000 investment for sequencing part of Epstein’s genome. The invoice included an estimated cost for “personalized longevity studies” that proposed using gene editing. The invoice indicated that Epstein gave a saliva sample.

The initial investment included $1,000 to sequence a portion of his genome known as the exome, and $1,000 to sequence fibroblasts, which are cells found in connective tissue such as skin and muscles, and that have been used in a relatively new field of research aimed at reversing aging.

Epstein’s staff sent a $2,000 check the same day.

Billionaire Jeffrey Epstein in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2004.
Rick Friedman/Corbis/Getty Images

“Mr. Epstein was enrolled in the Personal Genome Project, which would study his genetic predisposition to various health conditions. At one point, a $2,000 check was provided to cover DNA sequencing,” Thakuria said in the statement.

“I was a physician-researcher and he [Epstein] was a research subject,” he added. “We also had early discussions about his potentially funding research, but that never materialized.”

“I feel terrible about what his victims went through, and I regret at that time not knowing more about his background and the extent of his crimes,” Thakuria said.

Part of the proposal involved editing Epstein’s stem cells “to introduce mutations in culture believed to increase longevity,” using the then-novel gene editing technology CRISPR, Thakuria wrote.

“I’m only offering this to Jeffrey. Because of all the labor involved, there’s simply not enough bandwidth to offer this to more than a handful of people right now,” he added.

The invoice gave a range of options for future research such as creating new stem cells starting at $10,000, and broader longevity studies that included other patients, and indicated that it could cost “$11,400 for his [Epstein’s] whole genome ($21,000 if he wanted to include both of his parents; not sure if this is even feasible)” to be sequenced.

The full breadth of the projects proposed as described in the invoice would have cost $193,400.

CNN did not find a record of Epstein paying for those services, but emails continued between Thakuria, Epstein and his assistants until at least 2015. In these, Epstein’s assistants sought to follow up on Thakuria’s initial work. At one point, Epstein became annoyed with Thakuria for delays and threatened to report him to his bosses if results did not come quickly.

Department of Justice

Epstein died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges.

The disgraced financier had long been interested in gene editing. Through his now-defunct foundation, Epstein donated to the World Transhumanist Association, now called Humanity+, as the New York Times first reported in 2019. Humanity+ advocates for “technology and evidence-based science to expand human capabilities” and reverse aging.

Epstein also reportedly had discussions with scientists where he mulled using his own genes to seed a new human race.

The most recently released emails shed new light on Epstein’s relationships with top scientists in the field of genomics research and raise questions about how some may have sought funding from him.

In his statement to CNN, Thakuria said he was introduced to Epstein by George Church, a high-profile Harvard genomics researcher, as a potential research subject for the Personal Genome Project.

Church, who has pioneered gene editing with the then-novel CRISPR technology — used to cut, add and modify specific genetic sequences — has previously been associated with Epstein, who emailed with him frequently and donated funds to his research. Church apologized in 2019 for his continued association with Epstein, calling it “nerd tunnel vision” in an interview with STAT.

Church, who has not been accused of any wrongdoing related to Epstein, did not return a request for comment from CNN. The spokesperson for Harvard referred CNN to Church’s remarks from 2019 in response to questions about him.

Some of what Thakuria described in his invoice was opaque. The largest single item in the invoice was $160,000 for research he called “The Venus Project.”

Department of Justice

“Jeffrey and [I] briefly discussed a genomic research studying [sic] I’m dubbing the Venus project (he’ll know what this),” Thakuria wrote in the June 2014 invoice. “I can do this for him but doing this work would be greatly aided by having some good bioinformatic infrastructure.”

“[Epstein] mentioned 200 participants being in this project — I can deliver on this ‘Venus’ research,” he added.

In his statement to CNN, Thakuria said the project was “an idea of Mr. Epstein that was very preliminary and never went anywhere.”

“He was interested in the genetics of facial features. There was no funding, and no research.”

Did Epstein files include Lionel Messi and Sergio Agüero shirtless photo?

Users shared the alleged photo of the Argentine soccer stars, claiming U.S. authorities released it among files related to the late sex offender.

Image courtesy of @PeluCavani/X

In early February 2026, online users claimed a low-quality image showing two men shirtless in a bed confirmed Argentine soccer greats Lionel Messi and Sergio Agüero spent time on sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s Little St. James island. The rumor spread following the U.S. Department of Justice’s release of a new batch of Epstein case files.

For example, on Feb. 2, X user @PeluCavani posted (archived) the image with a Spanish-language caption reading, “Messi y el Kun Agüero en la isla de Epstein que hdp se me cayó un ídolo.” The first part of the caption translated to English as, “Messi and Kun Agüero on Epstein’s island,” with “Kun” referencing Agüero’s nickname. Other users also shared (archived) the image and claim.

(@PeluCavani/X)

In short, the image did not originate from the new batch of the Epstein files, nor did it appear in searches of “Messi” or “Agüero” the files on the Justice Department’s website. No evidence suggested the image showed anything more than two teammates posing for a photo. We did not yet confirm the origins of the image, nor did we definitively confirm it was authentic. For these reasons, we’ve left this claim unrated. We will update this article if we learn more.

Snopes contacted Messi and Agüero via Messi’s production firm 525 Rosario and the pair’s co-owned company KRÜ Esports, seeking more information about the origins of the image. We also attempted to contact @PeluCavani to ask if the user created the X post as a joke and will update this story if we receive responses.
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Digging into the rumor

Reverse image searches with Google Images and TinEye found websites hosting the image as far back as 2017, long before the public availability of near-realistic generative artificial-intelligence tools. For example, an archived page confirmed a user on the now-defunct Argentine social-networking website Taringa published the image as early as Feb. 8, 2017.

Searches for more information found websites including a FIFA.com article reporting, “Sergio Aguero and Lionel Messi have been besties for years.” The story documented that, in 2005, Agüero and Messi “bonded rapidly” and roomed together in the Netherlands during the FIFA U-20 World Cup, then known as the FIFA World Youth Championship. The Spain-based Diario AS publication reported (archived) Messi and Agüero continued to room together around matches for many years.

Users also shared a comparison of the alleged photo with an authentic selfie Messi posted (archived) to Instagram in July 2019, showing him holding a drink with Agüero sleeping in a bed in the background.

For further reading, we previously investigated whether a video showed a person drawing Messi and fellow soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo simultaneously using a special method.

Jeffrey Epstein allegedly ordered two “foreign girls” to be buried near his ranch after they died from “rough, fetish sex”, according to an email released in the latest tranche of the Epstein Files.

Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell ordered two foreign girls to be buried at this ranch, email claims. Photograph: (Department of Justice)

Story highlights
New Epstein Files carry an email mentioning two foreign girls who allegedly died from rough sex and were buried at the paedophile’s Zorro Ranch. The man who sent the email has not been named, but claims he worked for Epstein and knows about the New Mexico incident.