Shiva Ayyadurai

V. A. Shiva Ayyadurai (born Vellayappa Ayyadurai Shiva 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.

Ayyadurai holds four degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), including a PhD in biological engineering, and is a Fulbright grant recipient.

Shiva Ayyadurai was born Vellayappa Ayyadurai Shiva in 1963, in Bombay (now Mumbai), India.

He grew up in the Muhavur village in Rajapalayam, Tamil Nadu.

At the age of seven, he left with his family to live in the United States.

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.

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.

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.

While there, he set up an electronic messaging system for 100 users at the medical school.

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, and for the program's user documentation.

In 1994, Ayyadurai founded a company called Millennium Cybernetics, which produces email management software originally called Xiva and now called EchoMail.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

After the election, he promoted claims of election fraud that were shown to be false by fact checkers.