Shree Mulay PHOTO: OWEN EGAN

A cornerstone of the collective

BRONWYN CHESTER | Last spring, Shree Mulay was nominated for the first ever Helen Prize, named after the Australian physician and anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott, made famous in the film If You Love this Planet. Given the purpose of the prize, to honour women from around the world who have made heroic but unrecognized contributions to life, being nominated was as good as winning. The winner's name was picked out of a hat of 17 names! Does Mulay, director of the McGill Centre for Research and Teaching on Women, associate professor of medicine and longtime member of the South Asian Women's Community Centre (SAWCC) ever feel unrecognized? "Well," she says with a wide smile, "less so in the past year. The fact that the prize was published in The Globe and Mail brought me e-mails from all over the place." Being one of 10 Montreal women to be honoured by the YWCA as a Woman of Distinction didn't hurt either. That award, announced last April, took Mulay by surprise. "It was a real honour but I feel a bit phoney because the credit should go to an organization like SAWCC, which has really done the work. The work is collective, that's important to remember." Mulay's trademark has been to use her skills and position as a scientist and McGill faculty member to advance the cause of the collective -- be it immigrant women, young women aspiring to be scientists, her own graduate students or simply women in general. For the latter, she was also awarded the Prix Idola Saint-Jean, 1997, by the Fédération des femmes du Québec, one of Quebec's most prestigious public service awards, for which she was nominated by none other than the legendary union organizer Madeleine Parent. In the FFQ's presentation on Mulay, the first ever non-francophone to win the Idola, the citation noted that the long-time resident of Quebec works "constantly to link her community work to that of her scientific research." But they could have gone farther, to say that Mulay, a native of India, works to link women of different fields, countries and social classes, to try to make the best use of the resources available and build solidarity at the same time. "I see myself as helping put together groups which have things in common, to help them find the resources they need." One of Mulay's goals for the centre, for instance, when she took over as director two years ago, was to work more closely with women outside the University. Recently, for example, the centre co-sponsored with WISE (Women in Science and Engineering) "Astronomy to Zoology," a conference aimed at young women considering careers in science. The event drew students from CEGEPs, high schools and universities. The centre also helped SAWCC evaluate its services for women in situations of conjugal violence. "They needed to interview women who had used the service, but we don't have such a service here," says Mulay, sitting in the attractive conference room of the centre's Victorian walk-up on Peel Street. "So I linked them with the School of Social Work." Similarly, Mulay is working with Brenda Wilson, librarian of Trafalgar High School, who came to the centre looking for peer health mentors for female students. When Mulay understood that students would be doing a project on breast health, she suggested that Breast Cancer Action Montreal be involved. Bringing matters of health, science and women together has been a preoccupation for Mulay since she began her career as a clinical biochemist 35 years ago and she is particularly proud of having pioneered a new course that should soon be offered in the University's women's studies program: "Gender, Race and Science." In her own research in the Department of Experimental Medicine, where Mulay is assistant director of the Royal Victoria Hospital's Endocrinology and Clinical Biochemistry lab, this has been a good year. Mulay and graduate students Patrice Vaillancourt and Saeed Omer have published six papers on the subject of how the extra fluid in a pregnant woman's body is maintained without causing high blood pressure. Mulay is using her findings to investigate diabetic pregnancy in rats. Now beginning her third year of a five-year term as director, Mulay is anxious to consolidate the women's studies program. While it has existed for close to 20 years as a minor program and one as a major, the program's status remains fragile. Because the courses are offered by a number of faculties, such as Arts and Education, any department may choose not to offer a particular course. Mulay would like to see the program's courses be given more independence. She is also working with colleagues from Concordia University and the Université du Québec à Montréal to establish a joint graduate program. Being an administrator, a scientist and a community activist might seem like rather a lot to juggle and Mulay admits to feeling torn at times between the lab bench and the swivel chair. "I feel like I'm running from place to place and doing the actual work after hours. But I enjoy what I do. When I think of all the women working in hard jobs with little satisfaction, I feel privileged to be doing this." Perhaps because of feeling privileged -- Mulay thanks the aunt, grandmother and widowed mother, a pioneer in documentary filmmaking in India, who raised her and her two sisters, for giving her a strong foundation in life -- Mulay has made a point of being vocal on the question of the new reproductive technologies and their implications for women, both here and in the developing world. Last March, for instance, she gave a public lecture on the testing of Quinacrine, a chemical sterilizer, on unknowing women of Asia and Latin America. She has prepared documentation on the drug for women's and public health groups in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India. In India, the groups took the government to court for not protecting its female citizens and won. New reproductive technologies don't only affect women of the developing world. Mulay is alarmed by the free-for-all now existing in Canada when it comes to NRTs. She is "extremely disappointed" that the Royal Commission Report on NRTs, whose 293 recommendations were deposited to the federal government just before the last election, "hasn't been touched." She cites the example of egg "donations." Young women may be offered up to $6,000 for their eggs -- an attractive sum to a student or single-parent mother, for instance -- but what "donors" don't necessarily know, she says, is the risk involved in taking the necessary fertility drugs and in the surgical procedure. "I feel pessimistic; we're living in a deregulated world," says Mulay, who observes that now that NRTs are out of the news media "there's been a renewal of biotechnology… Dolly has been cloned, as well as 20 mice. What seemed like a remote possibility in 1989 -- human cloning -- is a real possibility now." She worries that society is blissfully marching off to a troubling future it hasn't critically examined yet. "We think women should take this up." And should they take up science? Yes, replies Mulay. "I say, 'Do it, change it, make it more responsive to the world we live in, relevant to the survival and betterment of our planet.'"