Alumni Profiles
Alumni Profiles Una Ryan née Scully (Zoology, 1963) Glamorous in California’s sunshine, Una Ryan explains why she and her husband wanted to live close to the Golden Gate Bridge. Its rusty hue warned ships away in San Francisco’s fog during the Second World War; the bridge is a symbol of care and guidance. Professor Ryan, a global leader in life sciences fields including vascular biology, immunology and biotechnology, was born in modern-day Malaysia during that same war. As a consequence, her mother fled the former British colony and the family’s rubber plantation with an infant in tow. It took the pair some 18 months to return to bombed-out London. While Professor Ryan has no distinct memories from the time, the experience ‘had a huge effect on me,’ she recalls. Brought up largely by an influential aunt, and surrounded by her relative’s impressive friends, Professor Ryan says her upbringing shaped her perception of women’s capabilities. Her aunt’s circle included female doctors, dentists and missionaries, who worked through the difficulties of their duties with grit. The obvious needs of London’s most vulnerable stirred an early desire in Professor Ryan to help them. ‘I saw there was a great need to cure children,’ she says. After attending Bristol University for her undergraduate studies, obtaining a degree in Zoology, Professor Ryan then studied at Girton, leaving with a PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology in 1967. ‘Girton was very important to me,’ she believes. ‘I had a female supervisor and that contributed to the sense
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that women could be good thought leaders and useful members of society.’ Intellectually the experience proved liberating, as she encountered ‘the kind of science that you don’t learn in textbooks’. Peering into the quivering secrets of a cell’s insides made Professor Ryan feel transported. Banter back and forth with Nobel Prize winners made her feel engaged. Her years at Cambridge included the first moment she looked down an electron microscope and the first instance she gazed up through a radio telescope. The universe and the body, the cosmos and the cell, comprise two of Professor Ryan’s greatest fascinations. ‘We are so beautiful on the inside,’ she reflects, ‘and so fragile from outer space.’ She says she returned time and again over the course of her career to discoveries she made during her research at Girton. Her particular focus at that time was on circadian rhythms in insects. America’s bright lights then beckoned. After studying angiotensin-converting
enzyme at the University of Miami, she took up a post at the institution’s School of Medicine. Then a position at Washington University in St Louis followed. Big business took note. Monsanto, then an agricultural and biochemical giant, made her a Director for Health Sciences. ‘In academia the focus is on the individual, it is your research or your publication,’ Professor Ryan emphasises. ‘But in business it is the power of the crowd and of the team.’ The shift suited her. ‘To make a drug which helps millions was the end of the equation for me.’ Professor Ryan has published papers on developing needed vaccines for both viral and bacterial diseases, as well as on cholesterol. (Her contributions earned her an OBE in 2002 and an Albert Einstein award in 2007.) And her eminent career has been peppered by positions in both the public sector and the private sector. ‘I think I probably made the greatest contribution, in terms of lives saved, when I was leading a public company,’ she concludes. Linking such work to her childhood, Professor Ryan explains that
