The book chronicles Biocon’s 37-year long journey like a story.

But Shaw started with technology, and added science at the back-end, and then kept adding to it, says author Seema Singh, a journalist for over two decades, specializing on science and technology-related writings. Biotech companies have traditionally started with science as the basis. Her’s is a start-up seeded nearly four decades ago in the field of life sciences, and not information or communication technology.Īs “Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw & the Story of Indian Biotech” seeks to portray, she was also not an engineer and did not come from a business family. She has managed to break the kind of myths that abound in the Indian scenario. Shaw, who received Padma Shri in 1989, embarked on the start-up journey from her garage 37 years ago. For Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, chairperson and managing director of Biocon, is also a trained brewmaster.

The fact that she will be different from her peers was also evident rather early. In Mythbreaker, author Seema Singh brings alive Mazumdar-Shaw's three-decade journey through a motley cast of characters - scientists, ministries, pharma rivals, FMCG giants - who came together to produce a narrative that is remarkable for its randomness, luck and relentless pursuit of the next scientific breakthrough.Start-ups may have become a familiar term in India in the past decade, but this lady dared to delve into such a mission - a domain dominated by men even today - more than three decades ago. To some extent, she has also plugged the brain drain of Indian scientists, making them collaborators in the fight against diabetes and cancer, and creating a space for research in India. Without a supportive academic ecosystem for biotechnology and in the absence of sound policymaking, Mazumdar-Shaw has tirelessly sought out global alliances and resources in her quest for ideas and molecules. And the accidental entrepreneur, Mazumdar-Shaw, is today a tough negotiator and a habitual dealmaker, casually breaking several myths about Indian women in business. Thirty-seven years on, Biocon is India's largest research-driven biotech enterprise. Armed with just a degree in beer making, this move to industrial enzymes and commodity small molecules was as audacious as it was far-sighted. Jeremy Levin, former CEO of Teva and current chairman and CEO of Ovid Therapeutics At the age of twenty-five, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw partnered with an Irish entrepreneur, Leslie Auchincloss, to start Biocon India in a garage in Bengaluru.

In Kiran's case, she likes to make everyone around her feel successful.' You have to live in an environment where, to make a deal successful, you have to make everyone successful or everyone own the failure you have to know what the risks are and what the success will be. Most people in larger companies don't like making deals because, if they go wrong, they lose their career if they go right, their superior takes the credit.

Mythbreaker by Seema Singh