Tu Youyou (born in 1930), a Chinese malariologist and pharmaceutical chemist, won the 2015 Nobel Prize for discovering artemisinin (also known as qīnghāosù, 青蒿素) and dihydroartemisinin - both used to treat malaria - saving millions of lives in South China, Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America.
She read historical Chinese medical classics and visited traditional Chinese medicine practitioners all over the country on her own to research plants that might work against malaria. Her final research included 640 compounds.
She found that sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua) was "particularly effective" (it had traditionally been used for used for "intermittent fevers," a major symptom of malaria). She also used a 1,600-year-old traditional Chinese herbal medicine text to figure out that heat extraction was not effective, but cold extraction was. She headed the team that researched use of artemisinin
Although artemisinin can no longer be used alone to treat malaria due to the risk of Plasmodium falciparum (the protozoan parasite that causes malaria) developing resistance to the drug, it is still used worldwide to treat malaria, in combination with other antimalarial drugs.
Tu Youyou also was the first test subject of the final drug. "As head of this research group, I had the responsibility," she said. She had no bad reactions, so she conducted successful clinical trials with human patients.
I don't get why her and her team's work was published anonymously in 1977 - maybe because there was a whole team involved, that she headed. But she presented the findings at a WHO conference in 1981.
Although the work was published in 1977 and presented in 1981, she didn't get the Nobel Prize until 2015. That may be a pretty standard delay in scientific achievement recognition, because it sometimes takes decades for the scope and impact of a scientific discovery to become obvious.
Her father named her Youyou, "adapted it from the sentence 呦呦鹿鳴, 食野之蒿[3] translated as "Deer bleat youyou while eating wild Hao". Hao is the genus artemisia, which includes Artemisia annua - sweet wormwood, from which Tu Youyou's team extracted the drug artemisinin.
Now that is an interesting coincidence, isn't it. Spooky.
A woman of science went to ancient traditional Chinese medicine classic texts to find a lifesaving treatment for malaria.
I think we should all be impressed by her - and by what the traditional practitioners already knew and had written more than 1,000 years before.
Humanity is amazing. Women of science are incredible.