Category Archives: Science

In 2015, Tu Youyou became the first first Chinese Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine and the first woman from the People’s Republic of China to receive a Nobel Prize in any category. The pharmaceutical chemist and malariologist discovered artemisinin (also known as qīnghāosù 青蒿素) and dihydroartemisinin, a breakthrough in twentieth-century tropical medicine. The resulting malaria treatment saved millions of lives in South China, Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America. While studying traditional Chinese and herbal medicines, she found a reference in ancient medical texts to using sweet wormwood to treat intermittent fevers, a symptom of malaria. Tu and her research team were able to extract artemisinin (qinghaosu) from wormwood in the 1970s. She even volunteered to be the first human subject to test the substance. Tu later became chief scientist at the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine, earning her position without a medical degree, a PhD, or research training abroad. In 2011, she became the first Chinese person to receive the Lasker Award for her discovery, which was called “arguably the most important pharmaceutical intervention in the last half-century” by the Lasker Foundation. Tu’s work in the 1960s and 70s coincided with China’s Cultural Revolution, when scientists were denigrated as one of the nine black categories (or “Stinking Old Ninth”) in society according to Maoist theory (or possibly that of the Gang of Four).