(MONEY Magazine) – In many countries, success is like royalty: you must be born to it. In sharp contrast, here your dreams are within your grasp. Why? This country has traditionally invited every citizen to exploit five basic American attributes that distinguish the U.S. from virtually every other country in the world: our willingness to give women the same educational opportunities as men; our unrivaled history of openness to immigrants, who remain an endless source of economic vitality; our easy access to higher education, as opposed to such nations as Japan and Germany, where teenage students must pass vigorous exams to qualify for college; our tradition of upward mobility, which -- more so than in the class-conscious societies of Europe and Asia -- allows children to escape the circumstances of their birth; and our uncommon acceptance of career change, which lets people reinvent themselves again and again until they unleash their full potential. Each of the persons profiled on this and the following nine pages embodies one of these all-American characteristics. In their stories, you will discover the traits that empower U.S. citizens to improve their own standards of living for the foreseeable future.

WALK THROUGH THE OPEN DOORS Michael Murphey-Corb scientist

In the global race for technological supremacy, America has a weapon that our major economic competitors lack: female brainpower. Today, American women earn 31% of all science doctorates awarded by U.S. universities. In Germany and Japan, the comparable figures are 21% and 9%. One of these Americans is microbiologist Michael Murphey-Corb, 44, who is credited by many of the world's leading medical researchers with laying the foundation for the eventual development of an AIDS vaccine. Fifteen years ago, Murphey-Corb, a married mother of two young boys, was working as a medical technician at Louisiana State University. Now she pulls down $70,000 a year and oversees $14 million in federal grants as senior scientist at Tulane University's Regional Primate Research Center near New Orleans. It was there, in 1989, that Murphey-Corb (pictured in her lab under a sculpture of the AIDS virus) developed a vaccine that has protected 18 of 19 rhesus monkeys from an animal form of the disease. Murphey-Corb enrolled in LSU's graduate program in 1976. ''As the only 29- year-old wife and mother in my class, people never took me seriously,'' she says. ''But I just stuck my jaw out and kept on going.'' She received her Ph.D. four years later and in 1982 joined Tulane's faculty, where she - currently supervises nine researchers -- all of them women.

CROSS THE BORDER TO SUCCESS Vincent Guerithault chef

America has welcomed immigrants more than any nation in history. Even now, the U.S. Government grants upwards of 650,000 foreigners a year permanent-resident status. The majority of these pilgrims, including French-born chef Vincent Guerithault, 39, come here for one reason: to prosper in a way they could not in their native lands. Guerithault is living a classic immigrant success story. He arrived in suburban Chicago from Paris in 1976 with one suitcase, $400 and no English. Now, as the owner of the acclaimed Phoenix restaurant Vincent Guerithault on Camelback -- where he is pictured at right with his one-year-old son Daniel -- he grosses more than $2 million a year, pays himself $300,000 and lives in a $315,000, three-bedroom ranch house with his American-born wife Leevon, 34. Guerithault came up as most chefs do -- the hard way. He left school at 16 and logged 18-hour days as a chef's apprentice at a three-star restaurant in southern France. The pay was $6 a month plus room and board. The duties included mopping floors and feeding the pets that their masters customarily drag along to dinner in France. He continued his apprenticeship at Maxim's in Paris before rising to chef's assistant at a restaurant on the Champs-Elysees. His break came in 1975 when a friend introduced him to chef Jean Banchet, who was in Paris hiring sous-chefs for his highly regarded Le Francais outside Chicago. ''Banchet offered me $25,000 -- more than double what I could earn in France -- plus room and board,'' recalls Guerithault. In 1980, he relocated to Phoenix to become a chef at Oaxaca, a restaurant that combined French and Mexican cuisines. Since his new employer paid him as much as $50,000 a year plus room and board, he managed to squirrel away $130,000 by the time he quit in 1985. A year later, he used most of his savings and a $125,000 bank loan to open his own place, where he serves French and southwestern dishes such as duck tamales. Guerithault, who became a U.S. citizen in 1983, still works 18-hour days, but the pay is better and so is the boss. ''If I'd stayed in France,'' he muses, ''I'd still be working for someone else and earning $25,000.''

OVERCOME YOUR UPBRINGING Jose Gaitan attorney

Americans and foreigners alike are justly horrified by the deprivation and violence in our nation's ghettos. What is often overlooked, though, is that most Americans who are born in the ghetto aren't destined to die there. According to researchers at the University of Michigan, 56% of teenagers whose family income put them in the nation's lowest fifth of all families in the 1970s had climbed out of the basement a decade later. Indeed, 12% were among the country's top 40% of earners. Seattle attorney Jose Gaitan, 39, was one of them. Gaitan grew up in the city's rough central neighborhood, the son of an illegal Salvadoran immigrant father who was deported when Jose was five and an American-born, heroin-addicted mother. Today Gaitan is co-owner of the law firm Gaitan & Cusack and an adjunct professor at the University of Washington's law school. He earns more than $100,000 a year and lives in a $225,000 house with his wife Olive, 40, and her two children from a previous marriage. (The couple are pictured at left in Seattle's exclusive Columbia Tower Club, of which Gaitan is a member.) Growing up on welfare, Gaitan remembers that food was so scarce that he shared two turkey TV dinners with his mother and younger brother one Thanksgiving. He found the path to a better life at Seattle First Baptist Church, where a minister, a Boy Scout leader and a Boeing engineer encouraged him to work hard in school. ''They took the time to nurture me and show me that I could change my life,'' Gaitan says. His grades won him scholarships at private Linfield College in McMinnville, Ore. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in political science and history in 1973, he returned to Seattle and worked his way through the University of Washington's School of Law, in part by scraping barnacles off ships. He stayed in Seattle and worked as a county and federal prosecutor until 1982, when he and a partner opened a private practice. Today his firm counts Nabisco and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation among its clients, grosses more than $2 million a year and employs 13 lawyers. Says Gaitan: ''Social and economic mobility is a function of hard work, a 'can do' attitude and being good to people.''

TAKE ANOTHER SHOT AT SCHOOL Hannah Reeves fellowship winner

In most countries, relatively few students are permitted to pursue higher education. College admission usually depends on standardized tests taken in high school. Fail and you can forget about college -- usually forever. The U.S. system isn't at all rigid: fully 20% of our 12 million college undergraduates are over age 30. Hannah Reeves, 32, the twice-divorced mother of son Brent, 13, and daughter Kate, 11, is one of these late achievers. Last May, the onetime high school dropout earned an anthropology degree from Scripps College, a selective, private women's school in Claremont, Calif. But that's not all. She also won an $18,000 Watson Fellowship, one of 75 granted annually to postgraduate students for independent research abroad. Reeves, who grew up in McComb, Miss., earned outstanding grades in high school but dropped out three weeks before graduation in 1977 to marry a carpenter. She divorced him after six years and two children because, she says, he abused her. After the divorce, she worked as a receptionist and a seamstress to support herself and her children when they were not living with their father. ''More than anything else,'' she remembers, ''I hated not using my mind.'' In 1988, armed with a high school equivalency diploma, she enrolled in a community college in Joshua Tree, Calif., where she had moved with her second husband, a park ranger whom she divorced a year later. After earning an associate of arts degree, she won scholarships to Scripps, where she shouldered a full course load and toiled 20 hours a week at the college's anthropology journal. Since she couldn't afford Claremont rents, she and her children moved into a two- bedroom, $425-a-month house in Twentynine Palms, a two-hour drive to Scripps. Her hectic schedule left little time for sleep. ''I just made up my mind,'' she says, ''that I wasn't going to miss another graduation.'' Last September, Reeves and her children -- shown at right at the California Academy of Sciences -- left the U.S. to spend a year trekking with Pygmies in Africa and aborigines in Australia. Her next goal: to write a book about her travels. ''Without a degree,'' she says, ''I couldn't make a difference in America. Now I can.''

RISK REINVENTING YOURSELF Mike Hernacki author

In Europe and Japan, the career you choose in your teens or twenties -- and often the employer -- is usually what you'r stuck with for life. But not here. Every year, one in 10 U.S. workers changes occupations. This license to be restless allows Americans to keep switching careers until they maximize their productivity and happiness. One such striver is San Diego's Mike Hernacki, 46, who shed his professional skin five times in 14 years before finally finding his calling as a freelance business writer. Now he brings in $100,000 a year working out of a comfortable home office (at left) that he impishly describes as a ''Victorian bordello.'' As the son of Polish immigrants growing up in Detroit, Hernacki dreamed of becoming a writer, but his parents, who ran a small grocery store, pressured him to pursue a more practical career choice. So after earning a bachelor's degree from Michigan State in 1965, he bounced from teaching elementary school in suburban Detroit for $5,000 a year to copywriting at a small advertising agency for $10,000 before going on to earn a law degree at Detroit College of Law. Though he was making $30,000 a year as an attorney in a Detroit suburb, he abandoned that profession too after only 18 months. ''I dreaded going to court,'' he says. ''All that conflict really got me down.'' In 1977, seeking a sunnier climate, he left Michigan for San Diego. Over the next 18 months, he earned $25,000 as a stockbroker. ''But I didn't want to be a stockbroker for 30 years,'' he says. ''It didn't excite me.'' In 1979, Hernacki's wife Wanda, now 45, encouraged him to quit the brokerage business and pursue his long-deferred dream of writing. For the first eight months he earned a mere $5,000. ''But for the first time in my life,'' he recalls, ''I loved what I was doing.'' The next year he began writing annual reports for brokerage houses and other corporations. His take: $31,000. Inspired by his own successful career change, Hernacki expanded his repertoire to include self-help books such as The Ultimate Secret to Getting Absolutely Everything You Want (Berkley, $3.50), which has sold 100,000 copies. Repeating the advice in his book, Hernacki says: ''Changing careers is a leap into the unknown, but if you love your work, the money will follow.''