What Do You Get When You Cross Jeffrey Epstein With MIT's Media Lab? Apparently Something Like Theranos

With the resignation of  Director Joi Ito from the Media Lab over his ties to Epstein there will be stories coming out that range from scurrilous to salacious to sickening with repercussions that are going to show up in unexpected places.
One trivial example: we won't be linking to Edge.org until some questions get sorted out.

From Business Insider:
The Epstein-funded MIT lab has an ambitious project that purports to revolutionize agriculture. Insiders say it's mostly smoke and mirrors.

Insiders told Business Insider that MIT Media Lab faked key elements of its "personal food computer" project (not pictured), which aimed to grow plants without soil.

• An ambitious MIT project that purported to turn anyone into a farmer with a single tool is scraping by with smoke-and-mirror tactics, employees told Business Insider.
• Ahead of big demonstrations with MIT Media Lab funders, staff were told to place plants grown elsewhere into the devices, the insiders said.
• In other instances, devices delivered to local schools simply didn't work.
• "It's fair to say that of the 30-ish food computers we sent out, at most two grew a plant," one person said.

MIT didn't provide a comment for this story.

An ambitious project that purported to turn anyone into a farmer with a single tool is scraping by with smoke-and-mirror tactics, employees told Business Insider.

The "personal food computer," a device that MIT Media Lab senior researcher Caleb Harper presented as helping thousands of people across the globe grow custom, local food, simply doesn't work, according to two employees and multiple internal documents that Business Insider viewed. One person asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation.

Harper is the director of MIT's Open Agriculture Initiative and leads a group of seven people who work on transforming the food system by studying better methods of growing crops.

The food computers are plastic boxes outfitted with advanced sensors and LED lights and were designed to make it possible for anyone, anywhere to grow food, even without soil, Harper has said. Instead of soil, the boxes use hydroponics, or a system of farming that involves dissolving nutrients in water and feeding them to the plant that way.

"We design CO2, temperature, humidity, light spectrum, light intensity, and the minerality of the water, and the oxygen of the water," Harper said.

On Saturday, Joi Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab, resigned following a lengthy expose in the New Yorker about the Media Lab's financial ties with late financier Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein died by suicide while in jail and faced sex-trafficking charges.

Staff placed food grown elsewhere into the devices for demos and photoshoots, they say

Ahead of big demonstrations of the devices with MIT Media Lab funders, staff were told to place plants grown elsewhere into the devices, the employees told Business Insider.

In another instance, one employee was asked to purchase herbs at a nearby flower market, dust off the dirt in which they were grown, and place them in the boxes for a photoshoot, she said.

Harper forwarded an email requesting comment on this story to an MIT spokesperson. The spokesperson didn't provide a comment.  

The aim was to make it look like the devices lived up to Harper's claims, the employees said. Those claims, which included assertions that the devices could grow foods like broccoli four times faster than traditional methods, landed Harper and his team articles in outlets ranging from the Wall Street Journal to Wired and National Geographic.

Harper's vision for the personal food computer is bold: "You think Star Trek or Willy Wonka, that's exactly what we're going for," he said in a March 2019 YouTube video produced by the news site Seeker.

Harper's coworkers told Business Insider a different story. They said the devices are basic hydroponic setups and do not offer the capabilities Harper outlines. In addition, they simply don't work, they said.

'They were always looking for funding'
Paula Cerqueira, a researcher and dietitian who worked as a project manager at the Open Agriculture Initiative for two years, told Business Insider that the personal food computers are "glorified grow boxes."

Cerqueira was part of a team that, on several occasions, delivered the personal food computers to schools. She also helped demonstrate the boxes to big-name MIT Media Lab investors.

During the organization's "Members Weeks" — once-a-semester events that drew donors including Google, Salesforce, Citigroup, and 21st Century Fox — Cerqueira and her coworkers would show investors how the technology worked.

On one occasion, Cerqueira said, her coworkers were told to fetch basil grown from a nearby location and place it into the personal food computers to make it look like it had been grown inside the boxes.

"They wanted the best looking plants in there," Cerqueira told Business Insider. "They were always looking for funding."...

....MUCH MORE

We'll have more tomorrow but for now I'm thinking how similar to Theranos this sounds and am having trouble getting all the tricks and lies that Theranos employed out of my head.

And then when Elizabeth Holmes stood in front of the American Association for Clinical Chemistry’s 68th Annual Scientific Meeting & Clinical Lab Expo and brazenly repeated same:
Theranos: Elizabeth Holmes To Face 1000 Scientists On Monday--UPDATED

It just goes to show there are a lot of sociopaths around.

Trust me, I've met a few and observed more (at a distance) and there really are a lot of them.