Bigtree listed Shanahan’s history in technology — she founded and sold a patent analysis software startup — and her current occupation as a financier and investor in medical and scientific research as other pluses. Not mentioned: his personal wealth (reports estimate more than $1 billion), which she enthusiastically donated to Kennedy’s campaign – $10 million since Marchand an additional $4 million to a Kennedy PAC for a Super Bowl commercial. Nor was it mentioned what drew her to Kennedy, the one qualifier the campaign repeatedly invokes: being the mother of a child with autism.
The Kennedy campaign has denied multiple requests to interview Shanahan, and she has yet to make any major media appearances or print interviews. Instead, she launched a podcast and participated in shows outside the mainstream. In these conversations, she leans into her identity as a mother.
But asked if Shanahan was helping Kennedy with the “autism warrior mom” voting bloc, Bigtree declined.
“Why would we need help with this group?”
Shanahan describes his life as the “American dream.” She grew up poor in Oakland, California. Her mother, an immigrant from Guangzhou, China, worked low-wage jobs and her father, a white American, struggled with manic depression and addiction. She fled to her grandparents’ house for the summer and eventually to college in Tacoma, Washington. While attending law school at Santa Clara University in 2013, she founded ClearAccessIP, a patent management technology company.
In 2014, she met Brin at a yoga festival in Lake Tahoe. After a brief married to a Bay Area investor, Shanahan, along with the recently divorced Brin. They were planning a future family when Shanahan, in her late 30s at the time, was diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome, which ended her early efforts to freeze embryos. “After three failed embryo production attempts and three dozen visits to IVF clinics in the Bay Area, I learned that I was not as unshakable as I thought,” she said later.
When Shanahan became naturally pregnant with her daughter, Echo (she credits acupuncture, “liver cleansing,” more sleep, and “letting go”) she took her personal experience as evidence that the medical advice she received was rubbish, motivated not by science but by financial gain.
Shanahan, armed with Brin’s money, began dumping million dollars in research into the extent of female reproduction – a consequence of longevity movement which had already wooed Silicon Valley backers. While the for-profit IVF industry stifled knowledge, she funded it through her new nonprofit, the Bia-Echo Foundation, researching better diagnostics and natural remedies for infertility.
“Your experience became a cause,” a characteristic in The New Yorker explained.
In April 2020, she found another. As Shanahan describes in podcasts and campaign videos, Echo was born “healthy” but began to “slowly fade away,” becoming less involved and speaking out. When Covid began to spread around the world, Shanahan evaluated her daughter over Zoom and received a diagnosis of autism. When speech therapy was distressing for Echo and didn’t produce the results Shanahan hoped for, Shanahan began to question things. Maybe, Shanahan thought, Echo’s autism was like her fertility—diagnosed by doctors and treated by experts who were ultimately wrong.
“Do your own research” was a common refrain in the Web 2.0 anti-vaccine community, before outsiders turned it into a joke aimed at conspiracy theorists. For Shanahan, it became a mission. She found a community of parents of children with autism, mothers and fathers of the Silicon Valley elite who didn’t buy into the medical consensus that autism is mostly genetic and can be lived with but not fixed. Shanahan spent more than half her time reading publications and posts about autism, listening to podcasts, and calling researchers who caught her attention.
This story originally appeared on NBCNews.com read the full story
