Top AI Scientist "Gone Mad" and Executes His Nephew In Front Of Courthouse

The episode opens on the conspiracy framing — researchers whose deaths get treated as patterns online — and then dismantles it. Chen's résumé is the reason people reached for that framing: a research role at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a postdoc in bioinformatics at Tsinghua, an invitation to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, a research scientist post in Harvard's statistics department, at least fifteen peer-reviewed papers, and his own Chinese biotech company using genomic data for early disease detection. The hosts sketch what that work involves, including the Human Cell Atlas effort to catalogue every cell type in the body and the ambition of foundation models trained on cells rather than language. Then they set it aside: what happened on 7 April 2022 outside the Cambridge District Court in Medford, Massachusetts had nothing to do with his research.

Leaving a hearing, Chen reached his white Chevy Equinox, locked eyes with his 23-year-old nephew — called Cohen in the episode — accelerated into him, pinned him against a parked car, reversed and struck him again, then got out and fired five or six shots. Police were seconds away with weapons drawn; the man who physically restrained Chen was his own attorney, William Barbino, who had just represented him inside.

Most of the episode reconstructs how the family arrived there. In 2016 Chen agreed to house his sister's only son in Boston for a year of English study; Chen's wife, given the pseudonym Michelle, opposed it and was left managing the household alone while Chen split his time with China. In 2019, arriving home three days early to surprise his family, Chen found his wife and his then-19-year-old nephew together; the relationship, reportedly begun through English tutoring, had run close to two years and continued after the nephew moved into a Northeastern dorm. Chen divorced amicably and tried to keep the reason private. That collapsed when the nephew told his mother his own version, and Chen's sister began demanding that Chen's ex-wife marry her son so he could get a green card.

The hosts spend a long stretch explaining the pressure on that sister through the Chinese internet nickname for her situation — a phonetic pun used sympathetically for daughters whose families spend their limited resources on a son. She placed into a Key Point high school and did not attend because the boarding costs would have consumed what the family was saving for Chen's turn three years later. She worked farms, restaurants and factories to fund his degrees at NPU, one of the seven defence-affiliated universities, and later stayed in their hometown caring for their parents. After their father died, she allegedly threatened to abandon their mother if Chen would not help her son.

Meanwhile the nephew was allegedly trespassing at the house, messaging Michelle relentlessly, appearing at her church and at the children's elementary school, and sending messages that were entered as evidence — including a threat to kill the family or himself. A restraining order was granted in late 2020, and the court hospitalised him briefly on a self-harm watch. The order ran eighteen months. At the April 2022 extension hearing the nephew testified that he had moved on and moved away; the judge found no significant change in circumstances justifying renewal. Their session was the last on the docket that day. Chen was denied bail, pleaded not guilty to murder and armed assault, and appeared at arraignment visibly unrecognisable to those who knew him. A 2025 wrongful death suit on the estate's behalf was resolved without damages. The hosts note how much of the online reaction in China and the US sided with Chen, and how much of the record — who initiated the affair, whether the stalking was as severe as described — remains rumour, with the FOIA request still pending and the man at the centre of the allegations unable to answer them.