Scientists Sell Themselves Too

Scientists sell themselves too.

Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01

Let me be clear up front: this post is not about academic misconduct. It is not about who faked data or who plagiarized, and it does not worry on behalf of academic purity. The data can all be real, the equations can all be right, and people are still selling. I only talk about desire: the desire to know, the desire to be seen, and the one nobody wants to put on the table.

First, let’s visit a temple.

Phoenix once had a place called the Phoenix Goddess Temple. Its founder, Tracy Elise, called herself a priestess and said the temple offered religious sexual healing. After the trouble started, she said: “I’m a priestess under attack.” The court was not persuaded by the temple. In 2018, the Arizona Court of Appeals upheld her conviction, and the opinion spells it out: specific sums for specific sex acts; one ad listed $204 an hour; when someone came and didn’t pay, the temple would call to ask why.

The priestess chased payments. It is the most honest religious text I have ever read.

Queer Spirit in the UK goes further. In its Temple of Sacred Sexuality, it ran a session called Ancient Egyptian Queer Sex Magick. Ancient Egypt, energy, magic, all of it. The whole description has only one sentence in plain human language:

This is solo work, aiming for simultaneous group orgasm.

Everyone jerks off alone, and they try to finish together.

Keep these two temples in mind. On to the next one.

In June 2026, the Gordon Research Conference held a meeting at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, called Induced Proximity Modalities and Therapeutics. Induced proximity. It is about molecules, and I am not joking. The organizers explain that the remote location was chosen on purpose, so attendees can form a community and build long-term collaborations. Monday’s schedule: posters from 4 to 6 p.m., dinner together from 6 to 7, then more from 7:30 to 9:30. The afternoon also has free time, which the official program says is for “informal interaction.”

A remote place, a few closed days, shared meals, evenings that don’t end, free time for informal interaction. Cover up the conference name, and guess which kind of temple this is.

Don’t tell me scientists go to conferences to exchange ideas. In May this year, Nature ran a careers column on how scientists who hate networking can network. The author is an academic career coach, and the advice is blunter than any research ethics course: if you’re not in the network, nobody thinks of you when a job opens up. So you go to the conference, and the talks are a side benefit. Your real job is to make the people who hold the grants and the positions remember your face.

Some places even post the price list. At the AGU Fall Meeting 2023, the title sponsorship of Braindate, the one-on-one networking program, sold for $30,000. The buyer got three things: your logo on site; the staff you send to host topics wear badges reading Thought-Leader Ambassadors; and one company representative gets an invitation to the AGU CEO reception. Thirty thousand dollars buys a “thought leader” title plus a ticket to drink with the boss. AGU25 had cheaper options: a banner ad in the registration confirmation email, $5,200, already sold out.

The temple charged $204 an hour; AGU charges $5,200 for one email. I can’t tell which is more expensive. I only know which is more respectable.

When it comes to paying for scientists’ attention, the person who knew the game best was Epstein. He is dead, so I can name him.

In March 2006, his foundation paid for a six-day physics conference at the Ritz-Carlton in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, called Confronting Gravity. Twenty top physicists came, three of them Nobel laureates, and Hawking came too. The local paper called him the driving force behind the conference and said he hoped a relaxed setting would free physicists’ minds.

The same year, he was charged in Florida. In 2008, he pleaded guilty to procuring a minor for prostitution. While serving his sentence, he applied for work release and left jail twelve hours a day to “go to work.” The workplace was called the Florida Science Foundation. He had registered it just a few months earlier, and it was housed in his lawyer’s office. That is what the U.S. Department of Justice report says. A sex offender’s alibi while serving time was called science.

He had been giving money to science for a long time. From 1998 to 2008, he gave Harvard about $9.1 million, the largest gift $6.5 million, to build an evolutionary dynamics program. After his conviction, from 2010 to 2018, he visited that program’s offices more than forty times. MIT took ten gifts from him, $850,000 in total. The first was $100,000 in 2002 for Marvin Minsky’s research. The other nine all came after his conviction, many recorded as anonymous.

The story is disgusting. But the part that stings most is elsewhere: Epstein never needed to pay anyone to fake anything. What he bought were dinners, conferences, an office key card, an afternoon with a great scientist. Those are the things scientists sell most easily, which is why someone buys them. It is also why this post doesn’t need to talk about misconduct.

Einstein said this more than a hundred years ago. In 1918, at Planck’s sixtieth birthday celebration, he opened by saying that the temple of science holds many kinds of people. Some come to enjoy their intellectual superiority and to satisfy their ambition; some offer the products of their brains for practical gain. If both kinds were driven out, the temple would be more than half empty. When he came to describe how people like Planck do research, the words he chose were:

is akin to that of the religious worshiper or the lover

Like a worshiper. Like a lover.

The temple again, and the lover again. Einstein stopped there. I’ll finish the sentence for him.

The brain doesn’t rank them for you either. When you’re curious, the regions that light up are the ones that anticipate reward, and the more curious you are, the more you’re willing to pay for the answer. Erotic pictures and money also share part of the reward circuit. Your brain didn’t build a separate, higher temple for knowledge. Wanting to know how the universe began and wanting a person take neighboring roads in your head.

Talking about others is easy. Let me talk about myself.

I entered USTC at 16 and went to my first academic conference at 17. I didn’t go only to hear talks. I also wanted people to remember me: this kid is only 17, this kid is from USTC. Being a teenager is a résumé in itself, and I learned early how to use it. There were plenty of people like me around. At fifteen or sixteen, they had already learned how to introduce themselves to big professors, how to pitch an unfinished idea as a research direction, how to make the other person remember their name.

Now it’s more direct: you can pay for it. A 2023 ProPublica investigation found that at least 20 online research programs for high schoolers had sprung up in the U.S. and abroad, alongside a string of journals that specialize in publishing high school students’ papers. One of them, Scholar Launch, starts at $3,500 for its entry-level program. Parents pay, the kid gets the byline, and in application season it gets traded for an admission.

All of this is perfectly legal. Many of today’s academic prodigies start selling in high school. So did I.

I don’t think it’s shameful. Selling your skills isn’t shameful, selling your time isn’t shameful, wanting fame, wanting money, wanting important people to remember you, none of it is shameful. What’s shameful is selling and then claiming you were on a pilgrimage.

Whether in the ancient East or the mysterious West, there are similar sayings. The East says “学成文武艺，货与帝王家”: master the arts of letters and arms, then sell them to the emperor’s house. The West says “Wes Brot ich ess, des Lied ich sing”: whose bread I eat, his song I sing. A thousand years ago, the simple folk of old were already selling. We are carrying the torch, so what’s the problem?

So next time someone at a conference tells you they do research purely out of love, you can believe them. Einstein said it too: like a lover.

Just don’t forget that the priestess in Phoenix also said she was doing healing.

I love it too. I’m selling too.