Fu-Kuen Lin

Who is Fu-Kuen Lin?

Fu-Kuen Lin is an award winning fungi physiologist, nephrologist and hemotologist.

Lin received his B.S. from National Taiwan University in 1964 and M.S. in plant pathology in 1967. That year, he moved to the United States to study fungi physiology under Professor David Gottlieb, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Lin was awarded a doctorate in plant pathology in 1971. He held postdoctoral and visiting scientist positions at several institutions between 1971 and 1981. He was an associate research fellow at the Institute of Botany, Academia Sinica in Taiwan from 1975–1977 and an adjunct associate professor at the National Taiwan University from 1976-1977.

Fu-Kuen Lin joined Amgen, a biotech company as a research scientist in August 1981. He was involved with Amgen’s recombinant human erythropoietin project from the start, and was soon leading the team, which was developing EPO based on a small sample of the hormone that had been isolated by a team led by Eugene Goldwasser as the University of Chicago. In 1983 his team successfully established the gene coding for it and recombinant human erythropoietin was approved by the US FDA in June 1989 with the generic name epoetin alpha, tradename Epogen.