PHILADELPHIA - About five months since taking the helm of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, Jim Greenwood delivered his first BIO convention speech on Monday to a packed ballroom in the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

The former U.S. congressman - who went from being a social worker to a politician, and now a lobbyist - described his mission for the organization: to make sure Washington's laws enable, not inhibit, biotech entrepreneurs in finding new treatments for devastating diseases.

To that end, Greenwood has hired a number of new advocates since taking over as BIO's president and CEO, r eplacing the retired Carl Feldbaum. He has brought to the organization Scott Whitaker as new chief operating officer, Alan Eisenberg as executive vice president for advocacy, and Amit Sachdev as executive vice president for health, to name a few. All three have experience working in Washington. Whitaker was the former chief of staff for Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, while Eisenberg served Greenwood in Congress, and Sachdev worked as the FDA deputy commissioner for policy.

While scientists battle disease looking for cures, Greenwood and his team plan to continue the charge initially led by Feldbaum.

"I am not a scientist. I am not an investor. I am not a businessman," Greenwood said Monday at the BIO 2005 plenary luncheon. "But I do know something about how government works."

Greenwood celebrated the fact that the convention this year is being held in his hometown of Philadelphia, a place that he calls "America's next great biotechnology center." The last time Philadelphia hosted the BIO conference, in 1996, a little more than 3,000 people attended. This year, the conference has 18,000 attendees from every state in the union and more than 60 countries.

As the industry grows, so do the protesters and so do the misconceptions about what biotech researchers are trying to accomplish. Like a disease, the misunderstandings spread to create flawed public policy that the "most brilliant researchers teamed up with the shrewdest entrepreneurs and investors" cannot budge, Greenwood said.

They fail "if the FDA takes too long to approve their products, if CMS and other payers fail to adequately reimburse their costs," he said.

Other legal issues facing the biotech industry are the government's ability to protect intellectual property, and the ability of generic companies to access process patents. Class-action lawsuits can lead biotech companies into bankruptcy, and unfair trade rules can block biotech-improved crops.

Companies will fail "if tax and capital-formation policies do not provide them the right incentives, if importation undermines the safety of their products," Greenwood said, "or if the protesters outside this convention hall are more convincing than we inside this building and inside of our companies."

Greenwood said the process of finding new, effective drugs is a difficult game, not unlike Plato's allegory of the cave. In the parable, Plato describes a cave in which people can look in only one direction, at a wall, where they see the shadows of objects held behind them in front of a fire. They never see the objects themselves.

When looking for cures to disease, researchers historically have had the ability only to observe the symptoms, not the "cellular, genetic and molecular identities," Greenwood said.

"We have fought a war against sickness only partially armed," he told the attendees. "Our mortal enemy is disease and it does not fight fairly."

To gain more government support for the cause, biotech needs to do a better job of educating the public, he added. When Greenwood told his fellow congressmen that he would be leaving to head BIO, many jumped to the conclusion that biotech simply meant stem cells. That led to the organization's creation of a video targeted to elected officials and other audiences as an educational tool to help people better understand what biotech companies do.

In it, Kelly Lamoree, of Syracuse, N.Y., discusses living with her 9-year-old daughter Hillary's cystic fibrosis and her husband David's Lou Gehrig's disease. Another woman with Stage IV breast cancer talks about her doctor's life-saving advice that she participate in a clinical trial. If her cancer had shown up only a year earlier, she said, she would not be alive today. The video also highlighted the potential for biotechnology to feed the world with genetically enhanced crops, and to reduce the dependence on oil by converting plant waste to fuel and to biodegradable plastics.

After showing the video, Greenwood ended his first BIO annual convention speech by introducing the Lamoree family, including Kelly, who insists she will someday see her daughter go to prom and have her own child, despite the current fatal prognosis for cystic fibrosis.

She wheeled her husband onto the stage, with Hillary walking beside them.

"Your work represents our hope twice," Kelly said.