12/26/2025
Super cool article about a brave woman who helped to find a cire for malaria.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/17x26vvnSv/?mibextid=wwXIfr
In 1969, Tu Youyou was given an impossible assignment: cure malaria.
She was thirty-nine years old, a researcher at Beijing's Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine. She had no doctorate. She had never studied abroad. She had never published in an international journal. And China was in the grip of the Cultural Revolution—a period when intellectuals were sent to reeducation camps, when scientific research was viewed with suspicion, when her own husband had been exiled for the crime of being an academic.
But soldiers were dying. Across Southeast Asia, malaria was killing more troops than combat. North Vietnam had begged China for help. Chairman Mao himself had ordered the creation of a secret military research program—Project 523—to find a cure.
Tu Youyou was appointed to lead one of the research teams.
The task seemed hopeless. Scientists around the world had already tested over 240,000 compounds. Nothing worked. The malaria parasite had developed resistance to every drug thrown at it.
Tu took a different approach. If modern science had failed, perhaps ancient wisdom held the answer.
She began searching through centuries of Chinese medical texts—thousands of recipes, remedies, and prescriptions passed down through dynasties. She traveled across China, interviewing traditional medicine practitioners, documenting their knowledge in a notebook she titled "A Collection of Single Practical Prescriptions for Anti-Malaria."
By 1971, her team had screened over 2,000 traditional recipes and prepared 380 herbal extracts. They tested them one by one on malaria-infected mice. Most failed completely. A few showed promise.
One herb kept appearing in the ancient texts: qinghao—sweet wormwood. It had been used for centuries to treat fevers. Tu's team extracted compounds from the plant and tested them.
The results were inconsistent. Sometimes the extract killed the malaria parasites. Sometimes it did nothing at all.
Something was wrong.
Tu went back to the ancient texts. She read and reread every reference to qinghao she could find. And then, in a 1,600-year-old manuscript called "A Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies," written by a physician named Ge Hong around 340 AD, she found a single sentence that changed everything:
"A handful of qinghao immersed in two liters of water, wring out the juice and drink it all."
Tu stared at the passage. Cold water. Wringing out the juice.
Her team had been boiling the wormwood to extract its compounds—standard laboratory procedure. But Ge Hong's prescription described something different. He was steeping the herb in cold water, then squeezing out the liquid.
What if the heat was destroying the very compound they were searching for?
Tu redesigned the extraction process. Instead of boiling water, she used ether—a solvent that evaporates at low temperatures, preserving the plant's delicate chemistry.
On October 4, 1971, she tested the new extract on malaria-infected mice.
One hundred percent effective. Every parasite destroyed.
She tested it on monkeys. Same result.
Now came the hardest decision of her life.
There were no clinical trial facilities in China during the Cultural Revolution. No formal safety protocols. No way to test whether the extract would harm humans. But the war continued, and soldiers kept dying.
Tu volunteered to be the first human test subject.
"As head of this research group, I had the responsibility," she later said.
She and two colleagues took the extract themselves, monitoring each other for adverse effects. They experienced no serious harm. Only then did they proceed to test it on malaria patients.
In August 1972, Tu traveled to Hainan Province with her team. They administered the extract to twenty-one patients suffering from malaria.
All of them recovered.
By 1972, Tu's team had isolated the active compound and named it qinghaosu—known in English as artemisinin. Further research revealed that artemisinin worked by attacking the malaria parasite at an early stage of its lifecycle, killing it before it could multiply.
It was the most effective antimalarial compound ever discovered.
But Tu Youyou would wait decades for recognition.
China's isolation during the Cultural Revolution meant her discovery remained unknown to the outside world. She was forced to publish her findings anonymously in 1977—the collectivist ethos of the era demanded that no individual take credit. Her work finally reached international audiences in the early 1980s.
Even then, recognition came slowly. The World Health Organization didn't recommend artemisinin-based therapies as the first-line treatment for malaria until 2001—nearly thirty years after Tu's breakthrough.
Meanwhile, the drug was saving lives. In sub-Saharan Africa, where malaria once killed a child every sixty seconds, mortality rates plummeted. Artemisinin-based therapies reduced malaria deaths by more than 20 percent worldwide—more than 30 percent in children. In Africa alone, over 100,000 lives are saved every year.
More than 200 million malaria patients have been treated with artemisinin.
The Lasker Foundation called it "arguably the most important pharmaceutical intervention in the last half-century."
In 2015, forty-three years after she first tested the extract on herself, Tu Youyou was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
She was eighty-four years old.
She became the first Chinese scientist to win a Nobel Prize in a scientific category for research conducted in China. The first Chinese woman to win a Nobel Prize in any category. And she did it without a medical degree, without a doctorate, without ever studying abroad—a "Three-Without Scientist" in a world that often measures worth by credentials.
At her Nobel lecture, Tu titled her speech: "Discovery of Artemisinin: A Gift from Traditional Chinese Medicine to the World."
She deflected praise to her colleagues, to the ancient physicians whose wisdom had guided her, to the herb that had been hiding a miracle for 1,600 years.
"I do not want fame," she said.
But what she gave the world is worth more than fame.
She gave millions of mothers the chance to watch their children grow up. She gave entire communities freedom from a disease that had haunted humanity for fifty thousand years. She proved that the wisdom of the past could unlock solutions to the deadliest problems of the present.
All because she read an ancient text carefully—and noticed that Ge Hong had written "cold water," not "boiling."
