An old proverb says that good luck has a way of visiting those who work hardest. Certainly that's true of Fu-Kuen Lin and his discovery of the protein that became a medicine to help millions.

In 1983 Lin, a research scientist, was the first to isolate the gene for erythropoietin and, subsequently, to produce human erythropoietin in a form and quantity that made its therapeutic use possible. Those discoveries led to the development of Epoetin alfa, which in 1989 would reach patients as EPOGEN®. EPOGEN® was Amgen's first marketed product—and the biotechnology industry's first blockbuster medicine.

Amgen staffers recall that Lin and his assistant Chi-Hwei Lin (no relation) spent nearly every waking hour at the lab. Their task was staggering: finding a gene on a single fragment of DNA among about 1.5 million fragments of the human genome. It took two years of dogged effort—and many unsuccessful approaches—before an ingenious method, using multiple short strands of DNA as "probes" to fish for the erythropoietin gene, finally worked.

At the time, "some felt that it took too long for a small company to spend so much time on a project," Lin remembers. "But I enjoyed it. I never felt it was a pressure to me." He adds, "It's better to work on a tough project than an easy one. The easy one may be fun to do, but you can learn a hundred times more on the tough one."