Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw

Kiran Mazumdar was born in 1953 in Bangalore, where her father was head brewmaster at United Breweries. She wanted to study medicine but did not win a scholarship, took zoology instead, and on her father's suggestion went to Ballarat in Australia to train as a brewer, the only woman on the course, graduating top of her class in 1975.

Back in India she found that no brewery would employ a woman as a master brewer; the job was thought to be unsuitable. She was preparing to take a post in Scotland when she met Leslie Auchincloss, the Irish founder of a company that made enzymes for brewing and food, who wanted an Indian partner. In 1978, aged 25, she set up Biocon India in the garage of a rented house with a capital of 10,000 rupees.

The difficulties were practical. Banks would not lend to a young woman running a business they did not understand; she recalls one manager asking her father to guarantee the loan. Her first employee was a retired garage mechanic, because nobody qualified wanted to work for her. Power cuts stopped the fermenters, and there was no clean water. Within a year the company was exporting papain enzyme to Europe and America.

In the 1990s she steered the firm from enzymes into pharmaceuticals, developing insulin and cancer drugs at prices Indian patients could afford. Biocon listed on the stock market in 2004, and she has since given much of her wealth to a cancer hospital in Bangalore, having lost her husband, her mother and a close friend to the disease.