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At 48, Una Ryan ditched a glowing career in academia to develop drugs for a large pharmaceutical company.

“I did a lot of things (in academia) that got me quoted and invited to important meetings,” Ryan says. “But I hadn’t done anything to reduce pain and suffering. At age 5, that was what I had set out to do.”

Today, at 58, she’s president and CEO of AVANT Immunotherapeutics, a Needham, Mass., firm. AVANT stock trades on the Nasdaq exchange. As of January 2000, market capitalization topped $300 million.

The job is “challenging and enormously satisfying,” Ryan says. She’s proud of her firm’s work, the company’s products and the fact that half the scientists in AVANT’s research and development division are women. She’s determined that “biotechnology is going to be an industry friendly to women.”

In many ways, it already is. Half of all U.S. PhD-level scientists in biotechnology are women, according to a January report by Harvard University’s Radcliffe Public Policy Research Center. Researchers studied the industry as a model for workplaces of the future–it’s a high-tech, knowledge-based industry prone to job insecurity and uncertain financing.

Biotech draws more women than any other field in biology, according to the researchers. They noted biotech offers more equitable opportunities than other science careers, and it allows greater flexibility for work-life integration.

Biotechnology, or the use of biological processes to solve problems or make useful products, has been around for more than 6,000 years. Making bread, cheese, beer and wine is old biotechnology. Modern uses involve manipulating cells and biological molecules to produce highly specified drugs and products for agricultural and environmental management.

As a contemporary industry, biotech sprouted in 1953 with the discovery of DNA, the basic material in chromosomes, and its double helix pattern. In the ’60s and ’70s scientists started using molecular biology to tackle medical, agricultural and environmental problems. As college biology programs and biotech venture firms grew, so did the numbers of women entering the field.

“It’s not just that women chose this industry,” says Deborah Hanson, a biochemist in the Biological Sciences Division at Argonne National Laboratory near Lemont. “In our society girls are raised to think biology is an OK thing for them to do. Maybe it’s a gender thing or maybe it’s instilled from early childhood,” she says. You probably won’t see many women in a jet propulsion lab, she notes.

Hanson helps organize Argonne’s “Science Careers in Search of Women,” an annual, daylong conference for high school girls interested in science.

When it started in 1987, the conference was aimed at college women. But organizers soon shifted focus to younger females. “We needed to catch them earlier,” Hanson says. “Science starts losing girls even earlier than that, in late grade school and junior high,” she says.

She maintains that early on, girls get subtle but powerful messages that the life sciences offer acceptable careers, but physical sciences don’t.

“This is a U.S. thing,” Hanson says. “In Europe you see many more women in physical sciences than life sciences, probably because girls there never had that prejudice that it wasn’t OK,” she says.

But a biotech career usually carries a burden of stress due to industry volatility. Unanticipated job losses and corporate buy-outs happen overnight, regularly. U.S. biotech firms spent more than $107 billion in research, development and technology in 1998, according to BIO, a Washington, D.C., organization that tracks and lobbies for the industry.

Even so, not quite 100 products are on the market today. A biotech company typically invests up to $300 million and about 10 years in a new product. Few make it to the final stages of FDA testing and, of those that do, only one in five make it to market.

That puts bioscientists on shaky ground. In 1986, six months after Hanson was hired for a high-level job at a large pharmaceutical company, she was among 72 scientists unexpectedly fired a week before Christmas because of a sudden market turn.

Some take the view that although a job might easily be lost, a biotech career is safe. “If I lose my job,” a bioscientist told Radcliffe researchers, “there are biotech companies popping up and going down all over. You kind of just hopscotch along.”

Radcliffe researchers also noted that women bioscientists and spouses of male bioscientists shouldered the bulk of domestic responsibilities. “Women continue to play a more responsible role, not only in childrearing and other family activities, but also in maintaining each family’s connection to community life,” the report stated.

Of more than 100 interviews conducted, not one female PhD scientist had been granted non-standard work hours, suggesting that career advancement still demands conformity to tradition.

One scientist, also a mother, lamented, “When the nursery wants parents to participate, I can never do it. I have to be at work.”

Even so, virtually all the bioscientists Radcliffe interviewed value “making a difference” and being at the cutting edge of a medical breakthrough.

As Una Ryan says, “There’s a vast number of investors. There’s a vast number of people who will benefit from our drugs one day. The world we affect is huge.”