On October 5, Tu Youyou was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her role in creating a drug that helped cure malaria in Africa and Asia, saving millions of lives.
Tu was born in Ningbo in 1930. She chose medicine when she left Zhejiang and headed to Beijing to further her studies in 1951. She attended the Peking University School of Medicine and graduated from its Department of Pharmacology four years later.
From university Tu moved to the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Then, in 1969, Tu was tasked with searching for a new malaria treatment and was sent to Hainan. There she saw a lot of children who were in the latest stages of malaria. “Those kids died very quickly，” she said.
But it was in ancient Chinese books that Tu found the key to beating the disease. Back in Beijing, Tu and her team read through books about traditional Chinese medicine for information on substances (物质) that might help them defeat malaria.
In a hundredsofyearsold text, they found a mention of sweet wormwood — or in Chinese qinghao — being used to treat malaria.
Tu's team put it to the test. The researchers found an active compound (化合物) in the plant that attacked malariacausing parasites (寄生虫) in the blood which would later become known as artemisinin (青蒿素)．
After it had been tested on animals, Tu took it upon herself to test it. “As the head of this research group, I had the responsibility，” she said.
The treatment worked and was proved safe for humans. Artemisinin became a crucial tool in the fight against malaria in Africa and Asia.
Tu Youyou, a famously modest woman, once remembered the moment of her discovery by saying: “Of course that was a really happy moment in my career as a researcher.”
