Shiva Ayyadurai
V. A. Shiva Ayyadurai (born Vellayappa Ayyadurai Shiva[1] on December 2, 1963) is an Indian-American engineer, politician, entrepreneur, and anti-vaccine activist. He has become known for promoting conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and unfounded medical claims.[2][3][4][5][6] Ayyadurai holds four degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), including a PhD in biological engineering, and is a Fulbright grant recipient.[7]
Shiva Ayyadurai
Independent (before 2020, 2023–present)
Republican (2020–2023)
Fran Drescher (2014–2016)
Forbes Dewey
In a 2011 article published by Time, Ayyadurai claimed to have invented email, as a teenager; in August 1982, he registered the copyright on an email application he had written. Historians strongly dispute this account because email was already in use in the early 1970s. Ayyadurai sued Gawker Media and Techdirt for defamation for disputing his account of inventing email; both lawsuits were settled out of court. Ayyadurai and Techdirt agreed to Techdirt's articles remaining online with a link to Ayyadurai's rebuttal on his own website.[8] Ayyadurai also attracted attention for two reports: the first questioning the working conditions of India's largest scientific agency; the second questioning the safety of genetically modified food, such as soybeans. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Ayyadurai became known for a social media COVID-19 disinformation campaign, spreading conspiracy theories about the cause of COVID-19, promoting unfounded COVID-19 treatments, and campaigning to fire Anthony Fauci for allegedly being a deep state actor.
Ayyadurai garnered 3.39% of the vote as an independent candidate in the 2018 U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts, and ran for the Republican Party in the 2020 U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts but lost to Kevin O'Connor in the primary.[9] After the election, he promoted claims of election fraud that were shown to be false by fact checkers.[10]
Early life and education
Shiva Ayyadurai was born Vellayappa Ayyadurai Shiva in 1963, in Bombay (now Mumbai), India.[1][11][12] He grew up in the Muhavur village in Rajapalayam, Tamil Nadu.[13][14] At the age of seven, he left with his family to live in the United States.[15]
In 1978, as a 14-year-old high school student, Ayyadurai attended a summer program at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University (NYU) to study computer programming. While a student at Livingston High School in New Jersey, Ayyadurai volunteered at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) where his mother worked.[16] While there, he set up an electronic messaging system for 100 users at the medical school.[17][18] In 1982, he registered the copyright for the source code of the FORTRAN program he called EMAIL, making it illegal to copy the code without permission,[16][19] and for the program's user documentation.[19]
Ayyadurai's undergraduate degree from MIT was in electrical engineering and computer science; he took a master's degree in visual studies from the MIT Media Laboratory on scientific visualization; concurrently, he completed another master's degree in mechanical engineering, also from MIT; and in 2007, he obtained a PhD in biological engineering from MIT in systems biology, with his thesis focusing on modeling the whole cell by integrating molecular pathway models.[20][21][22] In 2007, he was awarded a Fulbright U.S. Student Program grant to study the integration of Siddha, a system of traditional medicine developed in South India, with modern systems biology.[23][20]
Career
Millennium Cybernetics
In 1994, Ayyadurai founded a company called Millennium Cybernetics, which produces email management software originally called Xiva and now called EchoMail.[1] The software analyzes incoming email messages to organizations before either replying automatically or forwarding it to the most relevant department. By 2001, customers included Kmart, American Express, and Calvin Klein, as well as more than thirty U.S. senators to help handle constituent email. EchoMail competed with more established customer relationship management software that had an email component.[1][24]
CSIR India
In 2009, Ayyadurai was hired by India's Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), India's largest science agency, by its director general, Samir K. Brahmachari. CSIR was mandated to create a new company, CSIR Tech, that would establish businesses using the research conducted by the country's many publicly owned laboratories. Ayyadurai reported that he had spent months trying to create a business plan for CSIR Tech, but received no response from Brahmachari. Ayyadurai then distributed a draft plan, which was not authorized by CSIR, to the agency's scientists that requested feedback and criticized management. His job offer was subsequently withdrawn five months after the position was offered.[15][25]
Brahmachari said that "the offer was withdrawn as [Ayyadurai] did not accept the terms and conditions and demanded unreasonable compensation." In its report, The New York Times said that "going public with such accusations is highly unusual. Mr. Ayyadurai circulated his paper not just to the agency's scientists but to journalists, and wrote about his situation to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh." In that letter, Ayyadurai said his report was intended to explore institutional barriers to CSIR's entrepreneurial mandate. He said that CSIR scientists reported that "they work in a medieval, feudal environment" that required a "major overhaul". The letter was co-authored by a colleague, Deepak Sardana. Pushpa Bhargava, founding director of the CSIR's Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, endorsed the letter, calling Ayyadurai's sacking the worst of many cases he had seen of "vindictiveness in the CSIR" and accused CSIR administration of being "impervious to healthy and fair criticism". The incident was seen as an example of the difficulty some Indian expatriate professionals may encounter returning home after growing accustomed to the more direct management style of the U.S.[15][25]
Genetically modified food
In 2015, Ayyadurai published a paper that applied systems biology, which uses mathematical modeling, to predict the chemical composition of genetically modified (GM) soybeans, and whether or not they were substantially equivalent to unmodified soybeans.[26] The paper claimed that GM soybeans have lower levels of the antioxidant glutathione and higher levels of carcinogenic formaldehyde, making the modified soybean substantially different, contrary to previous safety assessments.[27] Shortly after publication, Ayyadurai embarked on a speaking tour of the U.S. At the National Press Club, he said that genetic modification had "fundamentally modified the metabolic system of the soy", disrupting the "beautiful way of detoxifying [formaldehyde]" present in non-GM soy.[28]
The European Food Safety Agency evaluated the paper and determined that "the author's conclusions are not supported" due to the lack of information on the input into the model, the fact that the model was not validated and because no measurements of soybeans were made to establish whether GM soy actually contained elevated levels of formaldehyde.[29] Plant scientist Kevin Folta noted that there was "no evidence ever published ... that shows a difference in formaldehyde between GM and non-GM varieties".[30] Ayyadurai later cited the study as evidence of a lack of safety standards for GM foods and bet Monsanto a $10 million building if they could prove that they were safe. Monsanto did not take up the challenge but stated that GM food did indeed undergo safety assessments that "are more rigorous and thorough than assessments of any other food crop in history".[31] In 2016, Ayyadurai promised to donate $10 million to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign if she could disprove his research.[32]
Politics and election misinformation
On March 17, 2017, Ayyadurai filed as a Republican candidate in the 2018 United States Senate election in Massachusetts, running against incumbent Elizabeth Warren.[33][34] He ran as an independent and placed third with 3.4% of the votes.[35][36]
Ayyadurai said that Senator Warren was at the top of a U.S. "neo–caste system" composed of "academics, career politicians and lawyer/lobbyists", a "spineless clan" who never expect to be challenged. He said he would take a science and engineering perspective on problem solving, focusing on immigration, education and innovation. He called for secure borders and an end to sanctuary cities, support for more choices in public education, and for more scrutiny of "pay-to-play" science research.[37] Ayyadurai has accused Warren of voting in favor of the Farmer Assurance Provision and against a GM labeling bill sponsored by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.[38] However, the Act was reportedly passed to avoid a government shutdown,[39] and Warren petitioned the Food and Drug Administration for "regulations to ensure that the labeling of GMO products is fair, standardized and transparent."[40]
In August 2017, Ayyadurai spoke at the Boston Free Speech rally, a gathering which drew large counter-protests and whose speaker line-up included right-wing extremists.[41][42] Ayyadurai later disputed how the event was characterized, tweeting that the "establishment" wanted to block attendance and media coverage and sought a "Race War to divide us".[43][44] In April 2018, the city of Cambridge threatened Ayyadurai with daily fines for an alleged zoning code violation if he did not remove a banner on his campaign bus. The banner featured his campaign slogan, "Only a real Indian can defeat a fake Indian", together with a digitally altered image depicting Warren in a Native American headdress, a reference to her claim to be of part Cherokee descent.[45] The city reversed its position the following month and Ayyadurai, in turn, dropped a lawsuit alleging that his free speech rights had been violated.[46] During the campaign, Ayyadurai appeared on a livestream with Matthew Colligan, a white supremacist known for his participation in the 2017 Unite the Right rally. Colligan requested that Ayyadurai bless a small statue of Kek, the green frog that came to prominence as a symbol of the alt-right during the 2016 United States presidential election. Ayyadurai obliged and described Colligan as "one of our greatest supporters".[47][48][49] Ayyadurai also sold pins promoting his campaign that featured a brown-skinned variant of the "Groyper", the namesake and mascot for white nationalist group Groypers which Colligan is affiliated with.[50] Ayyadurai also tweeted on one occasion (and separately retweeted another tweet including) the hashtag "#WWG1WGA", a slogan associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory.[51][52]
Ayyadurai ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination in the 2020 U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts.[53][54] By August 2020, Ayyadurai's campaign had spent $1.4 million, including $1.05 million of Ayyadurai's own funds.[55] After Kevin J. O'Conner won 158,590 votes to Ayyadurai's 104,782, Ayyadurai alleged that over one million ballots had been destroyed and that the state had committed election fraud. He alleged that ballot images had to be preserved for 22 months and were now missing. However, MIT political science professor Charles Stewart stated that federal law only requires that physical ballots be stored. Harvard law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos disputed Ayyadurai's allegation of fraud and a spokesperson for the state accused him of spreading misinformation. Fact checkers at Reuters and the Associated Press labelled the allegations as false.[56][10] On February 1, 2021, Ayyadurai was suspended from Twitter.[57] On February 3, he filed a lawsuit against Massachusetts politician William Galvin and other Massachusetts election officials, alleging that they were responsible for Twitter's suspending him. On August 10, Ayyadurai dropped the lawsuit[58][59][60] along with an October 2020 suit against Galvin.[61][62]
Personal life
Beginning in 2014, Ayyadurai was romantically connected with actress Fran Drescher. On September 7, 2014, Ayyadurai and Drescher participated in a ceremony at Drescher's beach house. Both tweeted that they had gotten married,[112][113] and the event was widely reported as such.[114][115][116] Ayyadurai later said it was not "a formal wedding or marriage", but a celebration of their "friendship in a spiritual ceremony with close friends and her family".[117][118] The couple split up in September 2016.[119]