In 1965, a group of scientists from Montreal arrived on Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui, to collect soil samples. This was the inauspicious beginning of an extraordinary and unpredictable series of events that make up a wonderful biomedical story. Distinct achievements and discoveries that shaped this story, in which I had the good fortune to be a protagonist, were recognized with a Lasker Award in 2012 and now in 2017.

The purpose of the scientists’ journey to a remote island in the South Pacific was to prospect for exotic microbes that might produce novel metabolites that could be developed into drugs—in this case, antifungal drugs. This is how drugs were developed in those days. In 1975, they did indeed isolate such a metabolite, which they named rapamycin, after Rapa Nui. However, while developing rapamycin as an antifungal, they found that it had the undesirable side effect of suppressing the immune system. Rapamycin was therefore abandoned and largely forgotten until it caught the attention of two bold transplant surgeons. In the 1980s and 1990s, Roy Calne and Thomas E. Starzl exploited the formerly undesirable immunosuppressive properties of rapamycin and two other natural compounds (cyclosporin A and FK506) to advance transplantation from an experimental procedure to an accepted treatment for organ failure. For establishing the clinical utility of cyclosporin A, FK506, and rapamycin as immunosuppressive drugs, Calne and Starzl shared the 2012 Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award. The citation reads,‘‘For the development of liver transplantation, which has restored normal life to thousands of patients with end-stage liver disease.’’