Richard Axel, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist and professor, announced Tuesday that he was resigning as a co-director of a flagship neuroscience institute at Columbia University because of his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.
The resignation is the latest fallout in the world of academia from the release of millions of pages of files in late January that showed how Mr. Epstein’s relationships with billionaires, scientists and others in positions of power continued even after his 2008 felony convictions and his prison sentence for solicitation of prostitution by a minor.
Dr. Axel is not accused of wrongdoing in connection with Mr. Epstein. But the files show that he was a frequent guest of Mr. Epstein’s at his Manhattan home and that he also served as an intermediary on Mr. Epstein’s behalf with Columbia officials involved in admissions and philanthropy.
In a statement, Dr. Axel called his association with Mr. Epstein a “serious error in judgment” and apologized for “compromising the trust of my friends, students and colleagues.”
“What has emerged about Epstein’s appalling conduct, the harm that he has caused to so many people, makes my association with him all the more painful and inexcusable,” the statement said.
Columbia said in a statement that it had “no evidence that Dr. Axel violated any university policy or law.” But it said that it agreed that with the “continued fallout from the release of the D.O.J. files,” it was appropriate that Dr. Axel relinquish his position as co-director of the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute. He will continue to research and teach at the institute, the statement said.
Dr. Axel, 79, runs a major research lab at Columbia that employs more than a dozen researchers and assistants, and he has been a Columbia professor for 53 years. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2004 with Linda B. Buck “for their discoveries of odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system,” according to the Nobel committee.
Dr. Axel also announced that he had resigned as an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, one of the largest and most prestigious private biomedical research organizations in the world.
Columbia said that it would not comment beyond its statement, and Dr. Axel did not return a request for comment late Tuesday.
Dr. Axel and Mr. Epstein had known each other since the 1980s, when Mr. Epstein first became involved with funding scientific work that he found promising, according to a 2007 New York magazine profile of Mr. Epstein.
“He has the ability to make connections that other minds can’t make,” Dr. Axel is quoted as saying about him in that article. “He is extremely smart and probing.”
Flight tickets show that Mr. Axel and his wife were supposed to fly to Mr. Epstein’s private island in late December 2011. Columbia said that visit did not ultimately occur. An email captured in the files suggests the reason was practical: “I spoke to Dr. Axel and he says to come on Sat. and depart on Monday is just too tight so he will pass this time,” Mr. Epstein’s assistant wrote to him on Dec. 29, 2011. “BUT requests another invite at some point.”
Dr. Axel is also listed as a confirmed guest for a dinner with his wife alongside Mortimer B. Zuckerman in the early 2010s.
In 2012, Mr. Zuckerman, then the owner of The Daily News, pledged $200 million to endow the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, which would become the flagship institution on Columbia’s new Manhattanville campus. Dr. Axel was named one of three founding co-directors of the institute.
Dr. Axel repeatedly served as an informal adviser to Mr. Epstein to help his associates’ children try to get into Columbia, the Department of Justice files show.
In 2016, for example, emails show Dr. Axel personally scheduled time to meet with Alice de Rothschild, the daughter of a billionaire European banker, after her undergraduate campus tour. He also made connections between the Rothschild family and a director of major gift development at Columbia and urged Mr. Epstein to tell the Rothschilds to meet with that university official directly.
“I have spoken with columbia admissions and she is good but not strongest candidate,” he wrote to Epstein in November 2016 of Alice Rothschild’s candidacy. “I am pushing.” She was ultimately rejected in February 2017, and enrolled at N.Y.U., where she studied biology.
“Alice de Rothschild’s university admissions in the United States, as well as her rejections, are entirely due to her grades,” the Rothschild family said in a statement earlier this month to The New York Times. “Alice cannot be held responsible for Jeffrey Epstein’s unilateral actions.”
A lengthy transcript in the files appears to show that Dr. Axel was talking with Mr. Epstein not only about science, but also about Mr. Epstein’s efforts to secure a pardon from Charlie Crist, who was then in his final weeks as Florida’s governor. That transcript describes a conversation between Mr. Epstein and a man identified only as Richard, who is described as doing the same scientific research into the olfactory system that Dr. Axel conducted.
The two make jokes about Mr. Epstein’s status as a sex offender, with Mr. Epstein saying that some women tell him that they find his criminal designation “exciting” and Richard replying with an off-color story about a 20-year-old prostitute with a much older man.
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