The Garage in Bangalore

In 1978, in a quiet part of Bangalore, a young woman rented a garage. It had a concrete floor, a shutter at the front, and not much else.

She was twenty-five years old. She had ten thousand rupees, a partner in faraway Ireland, and an idea that almost nobody she met understood. Banks did not want to lend to her. Many people did not want to work for her.

Her name was Kiran Mazumdar, and the company she started in that garage would become one of the largest biotechnology companies in Asia.

The brewer's daughter

Kiran was born in Bangalore in 1953. Her father worked as a head brewer for a large brewing company, and she grew up hearing about yeast, grain and the slow chemistry of fermentation.

She studied zoology at Bangalore University. She had hoped to study medicine, but she did not get a place. Her father suggested another path: brewing, the science he knew and loved.

So she went to Ballarat, in Australia, to study malting and brewing. She was the only woman on her course. She finished at the top of her class and came home in the mid-1970s as a trained master brewer.

The job she could not get

Back in India, she looked for work. She did some consulting and training at breweries, but the job she wanted, head brewer, was always given to someone else. She was told, again and again, in one form or another, that brewing was a man's work and that men on the factory floor would not take orders from a woman.

She had the skill and the qualification. The door was closed anyway.

She decided to leave India and was preparing to take a brewing job in Scotland. Then she met an Irishman named Leslie Auchincloss.

An enzyme company

Auchincloss had founded a company in Ireland called Biocon Biochemicals, which made enzymes. Enzymes are natural substances that speed up chemical changes. They are used in brewing, in making cheese and bread, in washing powders and in many other industries.

He wanted to set up a partner company in India and was looking for someone to run it. Kiran knew fermentation, and she knew how enzymes worked in brewing. He offered her the job.

She has said that she hesitated, because she knew nothing about running a business. She asked for one assurance: if the Indian company failed, she would have a job with the Irish one. Then she said yes. After a short training in Ireland, she came home and started Biocon India in 1978 in the garage of a rented house in Koramangala, Bangalore.

Papaya and fish

The first products were humble. One was papain, an enzyme taken from the milky juice of the papaya, which is used to make meat tender. Another was isinglass, made from the dried swim bladders of fish, which brewers used to make beer clear.

Almost everything was hard. Banks were wary of lending money to a young woman with a business they could not understand; the word "biotechnology" meant little to them. Skilled people were reluctant to join a tiny company run by a woman. Bangalore had frequent power cuts, and the water supply was not reliable. Much of the equipment had to be imported.

She kept going, one problem at a time. She hired people who were willing to learn, and she learned alongside them. Within a few years, Biocon was exporting enzymes to the United States and Europe.

From enzymes to medicines

Over the following years, Kiran began to see that the same skills, growing living cells in large tanks to make useful substances, could be used to make medicines.

In the 1990s and 2000s, Biocon turned more and more towards biopharmaceuticals. It began to make insulin, the medicine that millions of people with diabetes need every day, and later medicines for cancer and other serious illnesses. A central aim was price: to make these medicines affordable for patients in India and other developing countries, where many people could not pay for expensive imported ones.

In 2004, Biocon became a public company. The garage business had grown into one of India's most important science companies.

What she built

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, as she became after marrying John Shaw in 1998, has received many honours. The Government of India awarded her the Padma Shri in 1989 and the Padma Bhushan in 2005. She has supported cancer care and public health work in India and has often spoken about the need for more women in science.

She was refused a job because she was a woman. Instead of the job, she made a company.

Want to read more?

Biocon's website tells the history of the company, from the garage in Koramangala onwards. The Padma Awards records of the Government of India list Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw's honours. Many interviews with her about the early years are published in Indian newspapers and magazines.