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Ancient tradition and modern science, united to combat malaria
Tu Youyou is a medical doctor and pharmaceutical chemist, born in China in 1930.
She was a woman ahead of her time, who
knew how to converge traditional Chinese
remedies with modern science and apply them
to the cure of diseases.
Malaria was a disease that was affecting large
number of soldiers of North Vietnam in its war
against the South. After having studied traditional Chinese remedies during the later years
of her career, Tu Youyou had a lot of
knowledge about how plants could cure all
kinds of ailments. Thus, she began analysing a
series of medicinal plants in search of an active
ingredient that could stop malaria.
Finally she found it in Artemisia annua, known
commonly as wormwood. From this plant she
obtained artemisinin and, after conducting a
series of trials, she found that it killed the parasites with surprising ease.
The discovery is the most important breakthrough in tropical medicine in the twentieth
century, related to the improvement of
health in people living in tropical developing
countries in South Asia, Africa and South
America.
Despite the relevance of her findings to medicine, Tu Youyou had to wait fifty years for recognition, with the award of the Nobel Prize
in 2015.
Since 1965 she has worked at the Academy
of Traditional Chinese Medicine, in which she
is now scientific director.